Axios

Facebook's artificial intelligence lab has developed an animated bot capable of mimicking human responses to conversation by training it using footage from hours of Skype conversations, per New Scientist.

• One big problem: AI's biggest hurdle has been the uncanny valley, a state in which robots read to humans as almost realistic but still undeniably artificial.
• Facebook's researchers plotted 68 different facial reactions that take place during a conversation into the bot, which eventually learned the "correct" ways to respond to conversational cues. Volunteers judged the bot and a human to be equally natural during conversation.
• Why it matters: The bot is only still approximating — through repeated machine learning — what it thinks a conversational response should be, rather than holding a genuine conversation. Science still has a long way to go until such technologies can develop their own personalities or be tailored to response to specific situations.

Texas is helping to lead the charge to deport illegal immigrants, but with some 200,000 homes needing work or complete reconstruction after Hurricane Harvey, the state faces a potential crisis because of a shortage of construction workers, per the Washington Post.

President Trump's decision today to end DACA, the so-called Dreamers program that shielded the children of illegal immigrants from deportation, could exacerbate the shortages. Texas is losing not only a spine of its blue-collar work force — between a quarter and half of Houston's construction workers are illegal immigrants — but, because of low salaries, the state is unlikely to be a magnet for unemployed Americans.

Verizon has started a new program called Verizon Up, in which customers' data is exchanged for rewards, according to the Wall Street Journal.

How it works: Up credit is earned when a customer spends $300 on their Verizon bill. The credits can be exchanged for things like concert tickets, free months of Apple Music or Uber rides. In exchange, Verizon gets the customer's interests, visited websites, location, and more. The exchange is made "clear during the sign-up process."

Why it matters: Telecom providers like Verizon and AT&T want to compete with online platforms like Google and Facebook for a bigger slice of the digital advertising market. That means they need to collect more data about users to attract those advertisers. So they are offering more content and perks rather than simply powering the internet connections to deliver other companies' services.

President Trump and his allies in Congress are pushing to limit both legal and illegal immigration to the U.S., but more important than politics are powerful demographic and economic factors that will shrink future low-skill immigration to the U.S. in coming years, according to new research from economists at the University of California.

Bottom line: Between 2007 and 2014, the population of undocumented immigrants fell by 160,000 persons annually, and the authors argue that this is only partly the result of the Great Recession. Other factors driving the decline include:

• The end of the Latin American baby boom — the average fertility rate in Latin American countries has fallen from more than 5 children per woman in 1970 to just more than 2 today.
• Many Latin American economies have made significant gains in per capita income relative to the U.S., decreasing the economic benefit of emigrating.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group's bid to swallow up Tribune Media faces a new wave of opposition from competitors and consumer advocates who say the mega media merger puts too much control in the hands of a single media company.

Why it matters: If approved, the deal would bring together more than 200 stations that reach about 72% of U.S. TV households in 81 markets. The combined company would have at least one station in each of the nation's top five media markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas.

The other side: Sinclair says merging will bring financial stability to local broadcasters, who increasingly have to compete with online streaming services and other new sources of content.