Investorideas.com releases an i Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution,social media and marketing, content creation and more.

With recent progress in graphics, it has become more tractable to train models on synthetic images, poten- tially avoiding the need for expensive annotations. How- ever, learning from synthetic images may not achieve the desired performance due to a gap between synthetic and real image distributions. To reduce this gap, we pro- pose Simulated Unsupervised (S U) learning, where the task is to learn a model to improve the realism of a simulator's output using unlabeled real data, while preserving the annotation information from the simula- tor. We develop a method for S U learning that uses an adversarial network similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), but with synthetic images as inputs instead of random vectors. We make several key modifi- cations to the standard GAN algorithm to preserve an- notations, avoid artifacts, and stabilize training: (i) a'self-regularization' term, (ii) a local adversarial loss, and (iii) updating the discriminator using a history of refined images.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reinventing the creative landscape for marketers. One big leap: Brands are no longer merely seen as objects, but entities with personalities that can interact dynamically with people, according to Winston Binch, chief digital officer for Deutsch North America, the ad agency behind Taco Bell's award-winning taco-ordering chatbot, the Tacobot. Binch spoke to Catharine Hays, executive director of the Wharton Future of Advertising Program, on the Marketing Matters show, which airs on Wharton Business Radio, SiriusXM channel 111. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Catherine Hays: You are one of the true leaders in this space between AI and creativity.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.

Among the 22 Turing Laureates in attendance at the conference were: Front row, from left: Whitfield Diffie (2015), Martin Hellman (2015), Robert Tarjan (1986), Barbara Liskov (2008). Second row, from left: Vinton Cerf (2004), Richard Karp (1985), Richard Stearns (1993), Dana Scott (1976).

Charles William "Charlie" Bachman, the "father of databases" who received the ACM A.M. Turing Award for 1973 for creating the first database management system, died June 13 at the age of 92. Born in Manhattan, KS, in 1924, Bachman earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1948, as well as an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He went to work for Dow Chemical in 1950, using mechanical punched-card computing devices to solve networks of simultaneous equations representing data from Dow plants. In 1957, Bachman became head of Dow's Data Processing Department, through which he became a member of Share Inc., and a founding member of the Share Data Processing Committee. In 1960, Bachman joined the General Electric (GE) Production Control Services Group in New York City, using a factory in Philadelphia to test designs for a system to automate factory planning, scheduling, operational control, and inventory control.

Despite the fact that he does not see very well, Alexei Efros, recipient of the 2016 ACM Prize in Computing and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has spent most of his career trying to understand, model, and recreate the visual world. Drawing on the massive collection of images on the Internet, he has used machine learning algorithms to manipulate objects in photographs, translate black-and-white images into color, and identify architecturally revealing details about cities. Here, he talks about harnessing the power of visual complexity. You were born in St. Petersburg (Russia), and were 14 when you came to the U.S. What drew you to computer science?

Last week was the high point of the Dota 2 competitive year: it was the week of The International, Valve's biggest tournament. On Saturday, Team Liquid walked away with more than $10 million after defeating Newbee 3-0 in the grand final. Right now, one of the requirements to be a good Dota 2 player is that you've got to be a living, breathing human. The game does include some basic computer-controlled bots to practice against, but any seasoned player of the game should have no trouble prevailing over these bots, even on their hardest "Unfair" difficulty (though the Unfair Viper bot is a legendary jerk that's utterly miserable to play against). Last Friday, however, we got a hint of a new, altogether more threatening kind of computer-controlled player: an AI-controlled bot built by Elon Musk's OpenAI.

There have been many kinds of books, with many kinds of meanings. This one book was special because it was the first fictional story produced via artificial intelligence. It was the first book in the sense that its contents made sense. Before this book, all other attempts of letting an AI write a book had produced things that were pastiches of randomness. A couples of sentences here and there surrounded by text that made no sense.

Born in 1925, Aldiss had a huge influence on sci-fi, as both a writer and an editor. His work includes "Greybeard," set in a world without young people, and the "Helliconia" trilogy, centered on a planet in which the seasons last for centuries.