"Harold Cohen, artist and pioneer in the field of computer-generated art, died on April 27, 2016 at..."

“Harold Cohen, artist and pioneer in the field of computer-generated art, died on April 27, 2016 at the age of 87. Cohen is the author of AARON, perhaps the longest-lived and certainly the most creative artificial intelligence program in daily use.”

- Harold Cohen: in memoriam | KurzweilAI

"Today Silicon Valley chip maker Movidius released the Fathom Neural Compute Stick. It looks like a..."

“Today Silicon Valley chip maker Movidius released the Fathom Neural Compute Stick. It looks like a measly thumb drive, but inside it packs a high-end visual processing unit that can do a bunch of advanced image recognition.”

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Movidius puts deep learning chip in a USB drive | The Verge

Because it can plug into any device that has a USB port, developers don’t need to redesign or prototype new products to roll out machine learning features.

"We’ve long been promised a future augmented by intelligent helpers, of the type depicted in movies..."

“We’ve long been promised a future augmented by intelligent helpers, of the type depicted in movies like “Her”: benevolent digital beings who remove some of the chaos of modern existence by organizing our lives, all the while offering emotional support through chipper encouragement and cute jokes. Sometimes, these helpers turn on us, as in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Either way, artificial intelligence represents the manifestation of humanity’s biggest hopes and fears for technology. But for now, it can help us order Domino’s in a different window on the same device we would normally use to order Domino’s.”

- What Chatbots Reveal About Our Own Shortcomings - The New York Times

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"Here’s the important thing to remember: the new technique basically means that CRISPR just went from..."

“Here’s the important thing to remember: the new technique basically means that CRISPR just went from handling DNA like a meat cleaver — to handling it like a scalpel.”

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Breakthrough method means CRISPR just got a lot more relevant to human health | The Verge

The new method, described today in Nature, is called the “base-editing technique.” It relies on the same basic mechanism as the standard CRISPR method, but unlike its predecessor, it doesn’t need to cut both strands of the DNA double-helix to alter the genetic code. Instead, the technique can directly convert a single letter of DNA to another, without deleting and inserting a bunch of random letters in the process.