It's the new year, and TV shows are starting to finally filter back to the airwaves, including Gotham last night. While fansites have been reporting this for a while now, it was the first time that I realized that the show was actually bringing back Cameron Monaghan's Jerome, the show's "proto-Joker" that was (spoilers) killed off anti-climactically in a frankly fantastic arc that seemed oddly short, given the caliber of the performance and the importance of Joker to the entire Batman universe. But now Jerome is back, at least for another few-episode arc. Gotham has crafted a new plotline where despite Jerome's death, a cult is trying to resurrect his corpse Frankenstein-style so he can come back and wreak more havoc in Gotham. I do not believe the timing of this is coincidental.

"We created a virtual interactive avatar of the TV character, so that we can interact with the avatar in the same way that we would interact with the TV character themselves," Dr. James Charles, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds told Sputnik. "We're using TV shows as a scientific experiment. Our main goal is to capture what it is that makes people who they are and learn how to replicate this," Dr. Charles added. To make Joey talk, the team at Leeds University used an algorithm to pick from a database of sound units, scientifically known as phonemes. They selected the correct phoneme in order to string a sentence together and make it sound smooth and natural with the correct intonation and using the right words.

Since the final episode of hit sitcom Friends first aired in 2004, many fans have clung to the hope of a reunion. Earlier this year, the show's co-creator Marta Kauffman quashed that idea emphatically: "There will never be a Friends reunion movie," she told E! News. Could she be any clearer? But for those still mourning the gang, there is some sort of hope. A team of researchers at the University of Leeds seeks to immortalize popular characters as digital avatars that you might eventually chat with in the way you talk to Siri, Alexa or a similar virtual assistant. As spotted by Prosthetic Knowledge, the team is building a series of algorithms that can recognize and track individual characters and capture their body language, facial expressions and voice.