Microsoft Challenges Google’s Artificial Brain With ‘Project Adam’

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Nicholas Negroponte: A 30-year history of the future

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years.

BBC Click Will.i.am: Dangers of a digital life

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One of the founding members of The Black Eyed Peas, will.i.am, has told BBC Click about the dangers of living a digital existence. 

"People are walking around with their phones and their tablets multi-tasking, living two lives at once," he said. "You go on a date with your loved one, your significant other, and you aren't even there." 

"We have surrendered and are surrendering so much for this convenience, for free," he added. 

Click spoke to will.i.am at London's Barbican where he has an installation at Digital Revolution, an immersive exhibition of art, design, film, music and video games.

Algorithm to determine the perfect joke?

Comic and critic Natalie Haynes attempts to find the algorithm to determine the perfect joke.

Data structures exercise a tight grip on financial trading, but algorithms are now breaking out into virtually all spheres of human activity - from politics to household cleaning. Both university students and schoolchildren are being encouraged to learn computer programming to stand a chance in the brave new algo-world.

Natalie traces the Western World's increasing reliance on big data and ponders how its analysis could transform comedy, including a University of Edinburgh research project on unsupervised computer joke generation.

Along her mathematical journey, Natalie charts some of the chaotic muddles that algorithms have led us into, from security scares to retail problems, such as the offensive computer generated T-Shirts available recently on Amazon.

Natalie explores how these complex computer programmes are being used to determine not just stock prices but espionage tactics, film scripts, architecture and online dating. She glimpses the future of algorithms and the effect they may have on the things we buy, the partners we choose and the politicians we elect.

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The 1s and 0s behind cyber warfare TED talk

Chris Domas is a cybersecurity researcher, operating on what’s become a new front of war, "cyber." In this engaging talk, he shows how researchers use pattern recognition and reverse engineering (and pull a few all-nighters) to understand a chunk of binary code whose purpose and contents they don't know.