A Microsoft executive is facing backlash after suggesting that recently laid-off employees use artificial intelligence to cope with unemployment. The company cut approximately 9,000 jobs last week, many in its gaming division, as it continues to shift focus and invest tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. Matt Turnbull, an executive producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, posted AI-generated prompts to LinkedIn offering laid-off workers help with career planning, résumé writing, and even emotional support. The post, which has since been deleted, sparked swift criticism across social media where users called him'out of touch' and'tone-deaf.' 'These are really challenging times,' Turnbull wrote, encouraging displaced employees to use chatbots to help manage feelings of impostor syndrome and reframe their layoff experiences in a more positive light. His message included suggestions for using AI to develop 30-day job search plans and tailor résumés for different industries.

Single cell analysis of skeletal muscle (SM) tissue is a fundamental tool for understanding many neuromuscular disorders. For this analysis to be reliable and reproducible, identification of individual fibres within microscopy images (segmentation) of SM tissue should be precise. There is currently no tool or pipeline that makes automatic and precise segmentation and curation of images of SM tissue cross-sections possible. Biomedical scientists in this field rely on custom tools and general machine learning (ML) models, both followed by labour intensive and subjective manual interventions to get the segmentation right. We believe that automated, precise, reproducible segmentation is possible by training ML models. However, there are currently no good quality, publicly available annotated imaging datasets available for ML model training. In this paper we release NCL-SM: a high quality bioimaging dataset of 46 human tissue sections from healthy control subjects and from patients with genetically diagnosed muscle pathology. These images include $>$ 50k manually segmented muscle fibres (myofibres). In addition we also curated high quality myofibres and annotated reasons for rejecting low quality myofibres and regions in SM tissue images, making this data completely ready for downstream analysis. This, we believe, will pave the way for development of a fully automatic pipeline that identifies individual myofibres within images of tissue sections and, in particular, also classifies individual myofibres that are fit for further analysis.

If aliens are trying to talk to us (or even if they are not), Jill Tarter will be the one to find them. She cofounded the SETI institute in 1984 and ran its research center for many years. She was also the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 movie Contact. Astrophysicist Maggie Turnbull, who is currently running for governor of Wisconsin, began working with Tarter in the late '90s and is now affiliated with the SETI Institute. She's currently working on a NASA telescope called WFIRST, set for space launch in 2025. The two scientists take slightly different approaches to their search for extraterrestrial life.

It is vital to the economy that Australia embraces innovation, according to Andrew Penn, with the Telstra CEO saying Australia should mimic the telecommunications company's strategy of combining incubation and collaboration with building human skills and developing new technologies. Speaking at the Charles Todd Oration 2015 in Sydney on Thursday, Penn outlined the three drivers of innovation as being a combination of the move to mobile and consequently the Internet of Things (IoT); the widespread usage of cloud computing; and the rise of machine-to-machine (M2M) learning and artificial intelligence. "The exponential growth in data, driven by a massive shift to mobile and the Internet of Things with the ability to store and access that data in the cloud in real-time and the computing power with advanced algorithms and machine learning -- these factors together are providing the capacity to solve almost limitless problems," the CEO said. Citing a recent Deloitte report, Penn claimed that the digital sector contributed AU$79 billion in 2014 -- or 5.1 percent of the GDP -- making it the largest segment of the Australian economy. He said that the rapidity of technological innovation has had far-reaching implications for traditional business, however.

Recommendation engines are deeply embedded in American culture. Anyone who shops online, subscribes to a streaming media service, conducts on online search, or uses social media is encouraged to do something -- buy this, click on that, listen to this song, watch that movie. Sometimes the recommendations are accurate. For example, Google's search engine thinks I'm male. Netflix thinks I might enjoy comedies aimed at college-age men.

Visitors to Australia's federal parliament are often surprised by the robust verbal confrontation between the government and the opposition – technically known as questions without notice, more commonly as question time. A theatrical highpoint of every sitting day, question time is part intellectual cage fight, part kindergarten spat – and all psychological warfare. Political journalists watch the hour-long question time as drought-stricken farmers view the clouds. They look for signs, they read the climate. But what if you were interested in facts?