For much of the past year, Uber has been caught up in increasing waves of scandal. Earlier this week, the backlash against Uber finally came to a head for the ride-hailing company. CEO Travis Kalanick announced Tuesday he plans to take an indefinite leave of absence from the company, saying in an internal email he needed "to work on myself" and "focus on building out a world-class leadership team." Last month, Kalanick's mother died in a boating accident that also sent his father to the hospital. For the moment, Kalanick leaves behind a company that is reeling from a string of public embarrassments and now is without its central driver.

Jobs are disappearing, incomes retreating, the precariat growing. Thousands of people risk their lives in stormy seas to flee wars, moribund economies and climate change on a daily basis. Traditional politicians continue to avoid publicly addressing the tsunami of unemployment, apparently baffled as to how to react to a historic transition: the automation of critical masses of labour once performed by humans. Five acronyms - AI, AR, VR, BC and UBI - promise to shape the developed world's future and solve the problems of the present. In the process, however, these innovations risk transforming the world around us, and upsetting humanity's very definition of itself.

The CEO being referred to is NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) co-founder Jensen Huang, and he verbalized his insights on Moore's Law (and life after it) during the recently concluded Computex 2017 event held in Taipei. Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, is based on Moore's observation that because the size of transistors was shrinking so rapidly, the number of transistors that could fit per square inch on integrated circuits seemed to double every year since they were invented. Moore's prediction is that such trend will continue into the future. And although the pace may have slowed down, the number of transistors that could fit per square inch did continue to increase, doubling not every year but after every 18 months instead. With this exponential growth, computers became twice as powerful, benefiting not just the consumers but the device manufacturers as well. This went on for awhile (as predicted).

After discovering the amazing power of convolutional neural networks for image recognition in part five of this series, I decided to dive head first into Natural language Processing or NLP. This hotbed of machine learning research teaches computers to understand how people talk. When you ask Siri or the Google Assistant a question, it's NLP that drives the conversation. Of course, as an author of novels and articles, working with language seemed like the obvious next step for me. I may suck at math but words are my domain! So I set out to uncover what insights NLP could give me about my own area of mastery. I had so many questions. Had NLP uncovered the hidden keys to writing heart-wrenching poems? Could AIs turn phrases better than the Bard? Luckily, I had just the right project in mind to test the limits of NLP. I was in the midst of naming the second book in my epic sci-fi saga The Jasmine Wars but I'd struggled to find the perfect title. What if I could feed a neural net with the greatest titles of all time and have it deliver a title for the ages? This isn't my first foray into computer assisted title generation. There are a number of random title generators out on the interwebs that I've tried from time to time. They're the type of toy you play with for a few minutes and then move on.

Yemen-based AQAP has exploited a more than two-year-old civil war between the Iran-aligned Houthis and President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi's Saudi-backed government to enhance its influence in the impoverished country.

Amid growing pressure from governments, Facebook says it has stepped up its efforts to address the spread of "terrorist propaganda" on its service by using artificial intelligence (AI). In a blog post on Thursday, the California-based company announced the introduction of AI, including image matching and language understanding, in conjunction with it already-existing human reviewers to better identify and remove content "quickly". "We know we can do better at using technology - and specifically artificial intelligence - to stop the spread of terrorist content on Facebook," Monika Bickert, Facebook's director of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, the company's counterterrorism policy manager, said in the post. "Although our use of AI against terrorism is fairly recent, it's already changing the ways we keep potential terrorist propaganda and accounts off Facebook. "We want Facebook to be a hostile place for terrorists."

This week's news reminds me how much fun it is to be surprised by technology. Yesterday, the Paris-based AI startup raised $13 million, on top of an earlier $8 million investment, for technology that let developers put a voice assistant on nearly any device. Add this to recent advances from Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, and it's obvious that voice is becoming the new interface much sooner than many people, including yours truly, ever anticipated. These are exponential leaps forward in the steady progress from command-based interfaces to conversational ones. It's as if the machines themselves are disappearing -- the "thing" we're conversing with is some crazy fantastic blend of artificial intelligence, super computer, bandwidth, and what have you, that we never see.

This paper introduces DeepBach, a graphical model aimed at modeling polyphonic music and specifically hymn-like pieces. We claim that, after being trained on the chorale harmonizations by Johann Sebastian Bach, our model is capable of generating highly convincing chorales in the style of Bach. DeepBach's strength comes from the use of pseudo-Gibbs sampling coupled with an adapted representation of musical data. This is in contrast with many automatic music composition approaches which tend to compose music sequentially. Our model is also steerable in the sense that a user can constrain the generation by imposing positional constraints such as notes, rhythms or cadences in the generated score. We also provide a plugin on top of the MuseScore music editor making the interaction with Deep-Bach easy to use.

Random Projection (RP) technique has been widely applied in many scenarios because it can reduce high-dimensional features into low-dimensional space within short time and meet the need of real-time analysis of massive data. There is an urgent need of dimensionality reduction with fast increase of big genomics data. However, the performance of RP is usually lower. We attempt to improve classification accuracy of RP through combining other reduction dimension methods such as Principle Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Feature Selection (FS). We compared classification accuracy and running time of different combination methods on three microarray datasets and a simulation dataset. Experimental results show a remarkable improvement of 14.77% in classification accuracy of FS followed by RP compared to RP on BC-TCGA dataset. LDA followed by RP also helps RP to yield a more discriminative subspace with an increase of 13.65% on classification accuracy on the same dataset. FS followed by RP outperforms other combination methods in classification accuracy on most of the datasets.

Owners of a Samsung Galaxy 8 or Galaxy S8 can now try the smartphones' much-awaited virtual assistant, Bixby -- if you sign up. Bixby has not been officially launched in the United States, but Samsung announced Galaxy 8 owners can now sign up on its site to try a preview version of the feature. "New voice features are coming to Bixby and we're inviting you to get access first," the webpage says. Samsung touted Bixby as a part of the company's Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones, but it didn't release the virtual assistant in time for the devices' April launch. Bixby's full version was reportedly set to launch to Galaxy users in the U.S. later this month.