The answer probably lies in how we handle the almost limitless power of this still nascent technology. Though one thing is for sure - AI will have a profound impact on our jobs and future economic structures. AI has been thrown into the limelight in recent days thanks to the much publicized recent spat between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk - two tech titans who hold differing views on the future of AI and its impact on humanity. Does AI hold only positive outcomes as Mr. Zuckerberg argues? Or is there a potential downside as Mr. Musk warns.

Sony Corp., which is emerging from five years of brutal restructuring that gutted its workforce and product lineup, wants to show off a few new things. There's the Aromastic, a digital smell dispenser, AeroSense self-flying drones and a collection of tech-infused accessories called "wena." These gadgets are being dreamed up by the Seed Accelerator Program (SAP), started by Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai in 2014 to encourage invention and risk-taking. With Sony back on solid financial footing, shown by its estimate-topping results in the latest quarter, the company has more breathing room to experiment. Instead of focusing on raw, technical innovation, the devices coming out of the lab hark back to an era when Sony was able to take existing technology and combine it with slick marketing to create must-have gadgets such as the Walkman and Handycam. Another hit product could help Hirai cement his legacy as the one who not only turned Sony around, but got it inventing again.

Armies of content moderators are working to scrub social networks of the worst content humanity has to offer -- violence, gore, hardcore sexual imagery -- and they can't keep up. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine's Day.

Bengaluru: Last year, for the first time ever, an international beauty contest was judged by machines. Thousands of people from across the world submitted their photos to Beauty.AI, hoping that their faces would be selected by an advanced algorithm free of human biases, in the process accurately defining what constitutes human beauty. In preparation, the algorithm had studied hundreds of images of past beauty contests, training itself to recognize human beauty based on the winners. But what was supposed to be a breakthrough moment that would showcase the potential of modern self-learning, artificially intelligent algorithms rapidly turned into an embarrassment for the creators of Beauty.AI, as the algorithm picked the winners solely on the basis of skin colour. "The algorithm made a fairly non-trivial correlation between skin colour and beauty. A classic example of bias creeping into an algorithm," says Nisheeth K. Vishnoi, an associate professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at Switzerland-based École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Drivers are avoiding parking spots that require payment by phone as cash remains a more popular way to pay, according to the AA. The motoring organisation's survey of 16,000 members suggests seven out of 10 would look for parking elsewhere rather than use the "pay by phone" meters. The AA says people are put off by administration fees and voice-controlled phone payment systems. But councils said that paying by phone was a quick and convenient option. Nearly eight in 10 pensioners who responded to the AA survey said they would drive on rather than use them, the same proportion as drivers on low incomes.

Flyers may get a big discount off their flight tickets in the future, but there's a catch -- no pilot. Within the decade, several airlines could be on their way to rolling out pilotless flights, reports Fox Business. But, according to a new study conducted by Swiss bank UBS, consumers aren't as excited for the automated flights. Out of 8,000 people surveyed internationally, more than half said they would not be willing to travel in a pilotless plane, even if the ticket was cheaper. In the entire group, only 17 percent said they would fly on an unmanned flight.

Google Home doesn't have a huge range of on-demand music services on offer (Google's services and Spotify are your biggest choices), but you can add one to the list today. Deezer has launched Home support for its streaming music service, giving listeners in several countries a hands-free music source if they're not fans of the larger providers. The stand-out is voice control over Deezer's semi-automatic Flow playlist -- you can tell Home to "play your Flow" and get a highly personalized playlist with very little effort. Not surprisingly, Deezer is catering to its core European audience first: it's starting today with support in France and Germany, while the US, UK, Australia and Canada are due later in 2017. You probably won't rush to sign up for Deezer if you weren't already a member, but look at it this way: few music services outside of the majors work with voice-guided speakers, so this could be a reason to stick to Deezer if you were thinking of jumping ship.

Online review communities are dynamic as users join and leave, adopt new vocabulary, and adapt to evolving trends. Recent work has shown that recommender systems benefit from explicit consideration of user experience. However, prior work assumes a fixed number of discrete experience levels, whereas in reality users gain experience and mature continuously over time. This paper presents a new model that captures the continuous evolution of user experience, and the resulting language model in reviews and other posts. Our model is unsupervised and combines principles of Geometric Brownian Motion, Brownian Motion, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to trace a smooth temporal progression of user experience and language model respectively. We develop practical algorithms for estimating the model parameters from data and for inference with our model (e.g., to recommend items). Extensive experiments with five real-world datasets show that our model not only fits data better than discrete-model baselines, but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods for predicting item ratings.

Matrix factorization is one of the best approaches for collaborative filtering, because of its high accuracy in presenting users and items latent factors. The main disadvantages of matrix factorization are its complexity, and being very hard to be parallelized, specially with very large matrices. In this paper, we introduce a new method for collaborative filtering based on Matrix Factorization by combining simulated annealing with levy distribution. By using this method, good solutions are achieved in acceptable time with low computations, compared to other methods like stochastic gradient descent, alternating least squares, and weighted non-negative matrix factorization.

We consider a distributed learning approach in supervised learning for a large class of spectral regularization methods in an RKHS framework. The data set of size n is partitioned into $m=O(n^\alpha)$ disjoint subsets. On each subset, some spectral regularization method (belonging to a large class, including in particular Kernel Ridge Regression, $L^2$-boosting and spectral cut-off) is applied. The regression function $f$ is then estimated via simple averaging, leading to a substantial reduction in computation time. We show that minimax optimal rates of convergence are preserved if m grows sufficiently slowly (corresponding to an upper bound for $\alpha$) as $n \to \infty$, depending on the smoothness assumptions on $f$ and the intrinsic dimensionality. In spirit, our approach is classical.