Media
Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence
The pressing need for effective, timely and global governance of artificial intelligence Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is transforming our world. It has the potential to bring economic savings and to further research development in a wide range of problems ranging from climate change to the discovery of new cancer treatments to the retail shopping experience. However the economic and social benefit of AI must be weighed against the possibility of dystopian level scenarios such as the use of robots in making life or death decisions in war and issues already being seen, such as the spread of fake news and social media being used to influence elections. There is, at present, no regulatory body for the development of artificial intelligence. The One World Trust believes that this requires urgent action, and that we must develop effective, timely and global governance of AI in order to ensure that the benefits of these new technologies are shared, and potential harms minimised.
how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-the-video-industry
Artificial Intelligence has made a powerful technology that is useful for all businesses. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to analyze content, automate editing and make personalized recommendations in the video sector. AI-powered content analysis can identify the topics and emotions in a video. This information will improve video content and make it more relevant for viewers. AI can also edit videos by automatically identifying the most important parts and creating a summary. Businesses can save time and money through automated editing.
Deepdub raises $20M for AI-powered dubbing that uses actors' original voices – TechCrunch
Netflix's Korean drama "Squid Game" was one of the most-watched dubbed series of all time, proving the massive potential for foreign-language programming to become a hit in overseas markets. Now, a startup called Deepdub is capitalizing on the growing demand for localized content by automating parts of the dubbing process using AI technology. With its end-to-end platform, Deepdub can decrease the time it takes to complete a dubbing project, allowing content owners and studios to have results in weeks instead of months. What's more, it does this by using just a few minutes of the actors' voices -- so the dubbed version sounds more like the original. The Tel Aviv startup has now closed on $20 million in Series A funding for its efforts, led by New York-based investment firm Insight Partners.
What Can AI Do to Help the Publishing Industry? Trinka
Technological developments impact every sector of business, and the publishing industry is no exception. Publishing and media have been undergoing a rapid transformation as technological developments change the way that people work and plan their approach to tasks. There has been a rise in smart devices and a shift towards conducting much of our day-to-day lives online. This has resulted in print journalism becoming much less popular as online journalism takes over. E-readers have made whole libraries accessible from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, which in turn has influenced trends in content creation and marketing.
Rank-based loss for learning hierarchical representations
Hierarchical taxonomies are common in many contexts, and they are a very natural structure humans use to organise information. In machine learning, the family of methods that use the 'extra' information is called hierarchical classification. However, applied to audio classification, this remains relatively unexplored. Here we focus on how to integrate the hierarchical information of a problem to learn embeddings representative of the hierarchical relationships. Previously, triplet loss has been proposed to address this problem, however it presents some issues like requiring the careful construction of the triplets, and being limited in the extent of hierarchical information it uses at each iteration. In this work we propose a rank based loss function that uses hierarchical information and translates this into a rank ordering of target distances between the examples. We show that rank based loss is suitable to learn hierarchical representations of the data. By testing on unseen fine level classes we show that this method is also capable of learning hierarchically correct representations of the new classes. Rank based loss has two promising aspects, it is generalisable to hierarchies with any number of levels, and is capable of dealing with data with incomplete hierarchical labels.
The HaMSE Ontology: Using Semantic Technologies to support Music Representation Interoperability and Musicological Analysis
Poltronieri, Andrea, Gangemi, Aldo
The use of Semantic Technologies - in particular the Semantic Web - has revealed to be a great tool for describing the cultural heritage domain and artistic practices. However, the panorama of ontologies for musicological applications seems to be limited and restricted to specific applications. In this research, we propose HaMSE, an ontology capable of describing musical features that can assist musicological research. More specifically, HaMSE proposes to address issues that have been affecting musicological research for decades: the representation of music and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative data. To do this, HaMSE allows the alignment between different music representation systems and describes a set of musicological features that can allow the music analysis at different granularity levels.
MusIAC: An extensible generative framework for Music Infilling Applications with multi-level Control
Guo, Rui, Simpson, Ivor, Kiefer, Chris, Magnusson, Thor, Herremans, Dorien
We present a novel music generation framework for music infilling, with a user friendly interface. Infilling refers to the task of generating musical sections given the surrounding multi-track music. The proposed transformer-based framework is extensible for new control tokens as the added music control tokens such as tonal tension per bar and track polyphony level in this work. We explore the effects of including several musically meaningful control tokens, and evaluate the results using objective metrics related to pitch and rhythm. Our results demonstrate that adding additional control tokens helps to generate music with stronger stylistic similarities to the original music. It also provides the user with more control to change properties like the music texture and tonal tension in each bar compared to previous research which only provided control for track density. We present the model in a Google Colab notebook to enable interactive generation.
Tucker: Give Americans a voice in the policies that affect their lives
This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on February 9, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. It would be pretty fascinating to see the Democratic Party's latest internal polling on COVID restrictions. We haven't seen it, but it must have been pretty awful, apocalyptic, because something spooked them bad. Over the course of less than a week, the same people who have systematically turned America into a quarantine camp suddenly out of nowhere started calling in unison for medical freedom. Suddenly, they sound like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., pretty much all of them, even the whiny hypochondriacs at "The Atlantic" Magazine, those neurotic cat owners who've turned COVID hysteria into a religion are now calling for a total abandonment of all corona restrictions. Open everything, "The time to end pandemic restrictions is now." Believe it or not, that was the headline on "The Atlantic's" website today. So if even "The Atlantic" has given up on corona restrictions, obviously the pandemic is over. You should know this virus was killed not by science, but by the midterm elections. It turns out the only real cure for COVID-19 is the political ambition of the Democratic Party. Yes, every upside has a downside. It means that pasty NPR listeners are going to emerge from their apartment for the first time in two years, they will be loose on the streets. You're going to see them at Whole Foods again, shuffling along with their tote bags, looking bewildered and annoyed. That's bad, but it's still worth it, anything to make the insanity go away, we're celebrating. But we're also looking forward, and the question is, how do we guarantee that nothing like this ever happens again? How do we prevent future mass hysteria events in the United States?
How an AI neural network brought Luke Skywalker's voice to The Book of Boba Fett
At the end of season 2 of The Mandalorian (which aired in December 2020, so spoiler alerts are meaningless but here we are), a DeepFaked CGI version of Luke Skywalker makes a surprising appearance to recruit the young Grogu for his upcoming Jedi revival scheme. It was both a cool and creepy moment, with the impressive digital imaging nestling way too comfortably in the heart of the Uncanny Valley. It was so ineffably unsettling that a random YouTuber tried to fix the scene himself -- and did such a good job that Disney hired him. When CGI DeepFake Luke Skywalker returned in The Book of Boba Fett, his robotic performance was noticeably more convincing. But there was something about his voice that was still … off.
Farewell Douglas Trumbull, visual effects pioneer
If you've watched a classic, landmark sci-fi movie and you were blown away by the quality and realism of its effects, then there's a good chance Douglas Trumbull's name is in the credits. The VFX pioneer, who passed away on February 8th, 2022, has worked on key films in the sci-fi canon. Even a short version of his resume would have to include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and Silent Running. To have worked on one of those in your lifetime would have been a big deal, but to have contributed to all of them speaks to just how much work Trumbull did to push the artform forward. Trumbull was the son of an artist and engineer, Donald Trumbull, who worked on VFX for The Wizard of Oz.