One of Google's latest projects is the Magenta project, an effort to generate music, video and images using machine intelligence. The big question Project Magenta tries to answer is, "Can machines make music and art?" If this is possible, the Google team wants to learn how, and if it cannot, they want to know why. Douglas Eck, one of the research scientists working on Magenta, wrote that before Magenta, he worked on music search and recommendation for Google Play Music. His goal in this area was to "use machine learning and an audio signal processing to help listeners find the music they want when they want it."

Learning machines are capable of working ever more autonomously on ever more complex tasks. In this blog, Muz Janoowalla explores whether it would be smart for humankind to develop an'intelligent gun'. There are an estimated 875 million civilian, law-enforcement, and military firearms in the world, of which 650 million are in the hands of civilians, either legally or illegally. Given the plethora of high-profile gun attacks in recent months and years – particularly in the US, but also in France, Norway, Pakistan and Tunisia, to name but a few – it is disturbingly easy to imagine gunmen on the loose in a school or at a public event, shooting indiscriminately and leaving casualties in their wake. Imagine how different things could be if a gun had artificial intelligence built into it, turning it into an intelligent gun.

Imagine you're sitting in a coffee shop. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a stranger pointing his phone in your direction. The next day, you get an email from someone claiming to have seen you at the coffee shop. You have no idea how he got your contact information, let alone how he identified you. The power to identify total strangers on the street is the advertising pitch for a new wave of startups hoping to capitalize on rapidly advancing facial recognition technology.

Professor Yale Patt, the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has been named the 2016 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute. Patt is a renowned computer architect, whose research has resulted in transformational changes to the nature of high-performance microprocessors, including the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. He has received ACM's highest honors both in computer architecture (the 1996 Eckert-Mauchly Award) and in education (the 2000 Karl V. Karlstrom Award). He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Derek Chiou, an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, conducted an extensive interview of Patt, covering his formative years to his Ph.D. in 1966, his career since then, and his views on a number of issues. Presented here are excerpts from that interview; the full interview is available via the link appearing on the last page of this interview. DEREK CHIOU: Let's start with the influences that helped shape you into who you are. I have often heard you comment on your actions as, "That's the way my mother raised me." YALE PATT: In my view my mother was the most incredible human being who ever lived. Born in Eastern Europe, with her parents' permission, at the age of 20, she came to America by herself. A poor immigrant, she met and married my father, also from a poor immigrant family, and they raised three children. We grew up in one of the poorer sections of Boston. Because of my mother's insistence, I was the first from that neighborhood to go to college. My brother was the second. My sister was the third. You have often said that as far as your professional life is concerned, she taught you three important lessons. Almost everyone in our neighborhood quit school when they turned 16 and went to work in the Converse Rubber factory, which was maybe 100 yards from our apartment. She would have none of it.

The BMW WELCOMES are back at BMW Welt with exciting topics for 2016. We are kicking off the BMW Welcomes 2016 season on April 21st at 7.45 pm(CET). Four international experts are examining the topic ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Catalin Voss (Founder Sension; Research Scholar Stanford University School of Medicine) Dr. Nicholas Haber (Chief Scientific Officer Sension; Postdoctoral Research Fellow Stanford University School of Medicine) „Autism Glass Project: Can Artificial Intelligence Make Us More Empathetic?" Dr. Werner Huber (Manager Highly Automated Driving, BMW Group) "Human or Robot - who will control our future vehicle?"

Robin Hanson thinks the robot takeover, when it comes, will be in the form of emulations. In his new book, The Age of Em, the economist explains: you take the best and brightest 200 human beings on the planet, you scan their brains and you get robots that to all intents and purposes are indivisible from the humans on which they are based, except a thousand times faster and better. Related: The Guardian view on artificial intelligence: look out, it's ahead of you Editorial For some reason, conversationally, Hanson repeatedly calls these 200 human prototypes "the billionaires", even though having a billion in any currency would be strong evidence against your being the brightest, since you have no sense of how much is enough. But that's just a natural difference of opinion between an economist and a mediocre person who is now afraid of the future. These Ems, being superior at everything and having no material needs that couldn't be satisfied virtually, will undercut humans in the labour market, and render us totally unnecessary.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett is still listing "ending two wars" as one of the major accomplishments of the Obama administration, despite deepening U.S. involvement overseas – including the recent U.S. drone strike that took out Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour. Jarrett, one of President Obama's closest aides, made the remarks in an interview aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." Asked whatever happened to the president's call for "hope and change," she cited a slew of changes during Obama's two terms: "Just look at what's happened in the last seven years. While the interview may have been conducted before the official Pentagon announcement, her comments coincided with the news that a drone strike had taken out Taliban leader Mansour in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan – the latest sign of the prolonged fight in the Middle East and South Asia. Even before those comments, the administration was taking criticism for efforts to downplay U.S. military actions against terror and insurgent groups.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

The rise of artificial intelligence could have a more anticlimactic outcome than most doomsday films would have you expect. Rather than being violently wiped out by robotic beings, humankind may become'eternally useless' due to the increasing capabilities of AI. This is according to bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari, who explores bleak future of humanity and'the rise of the useless class' in his upcoming novel Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. The rise of artificial intelligence could have a more anticlimactic outcome than most doomsday films would have you expect. Rather than being violently wiped out by robotic beings, the increasing capabilities of AI may instead render humankind'eternally useless.'

Devoted to multi-task learning and structured output learning, operator-valued kernels provide a flexible tool to build vector-valued functions in the context of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces. To scale up these methods, we extend the celebrated Random Fourier Feature methodology to get an approximation of operator-valued kernels. We propose a general principle for Operator-valued Random Fourier Feature construction relying on a generalization of Bochner's theorem for translation-invariant operator-valued Mercer kernels. We prove the uniform convergence of the kernel approximation for bounded and unbounded operator random Fourier features using appropriate Bernstein matrix concentration inequality. An experimental proof-of-concept shows the quality of the approximation and the efficiency of the corresponding linear models on example datasets.