Media
Samsung launches new flagship Galaxy S21 range
Samsung has unveiled its latest range of flagship smartphones, with three models ranging in price from £769 ($799) to £1,149 ($1,199). The S21 range from the South Korean tech giant features an entry-level model, the mid-range Plus, and the Ultra – which is the first S Series phone to be compatible with the Samsung's S-Pen stylus. The stand-out feature on all three devices is the upgraded rear camera system, which was heavily leaked ahead of today's announcement and features night and portrait mode as well as its 100x'space zoom'. Pre-orders of the handsets open today, and the phones will be available as of January 29. The Ultra also comes with S-pen compatibility, the first Galaxy device to do so.
Why Horror Films Are More Popular Than Ever - Issue 95: Escape
Horror films were wildly popular on streaming platforms over the past year, and 2020 saw the horror genre take home its largest share of the box office in modern history.1 In a year where the world was stricken by real horrors, why were many people escaping to worlds full of fictional horrors? As odd as it may sound, the fact that people were more anxious in 2020 may be one reason why horror films were so popular. A look at typical horror fans may provide some clues about the nature of this peculiar phenomenon. For example, horror fans often mention their own anxiety and how horror helps them deal with it.
Archive review – anyone for a posthuman wife? She comes with an off switch
British illustrator and visual-effects director Gavin Rothery makes his feature debut with this artificial intelligence thriller: a tale of love, death and robotics that has some nicely creepy moments. Set in 2038, it centres on lonely computer scientist George Almore (Divergent's Theo James), who is holed up in a remote research facility in Japan secretly working on an android version of his wife Jules (Stacy Martin); she has died in a car crash. His prototype, J3 (also played by Martin), is his closest yet to the real thing: a highly advanced humanoid with spookily pale skin who looks like she might be the ghost of his dead wife. Poor old J1 and J2, his earlier, clunkier prototypes: they look on bitterly as the newer, sleeker model gets all George's attention. The movie opens with sweeping helicopter shots over a snowy forest.
Hostility Detection and Covid-19 Fake News Detection in Social Media
Gupta, Ayush, Sukumaran, Rohan, John, Kevin, Teki, Sundeep
Withtheadventofsocialmedia,therehasbeenanextremely rapid increase in the content shared online. Consequently, the propagation of fake news and hostile messages on social media platforms has also skyrocketed. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting hostile and fake content in the Devanagari (Hindi) script as a multi-class, multi-label problem. Using NLP techniques, we build a model that makes use of an abusive language detector coupled with features extracted via Hindi BERT and Hindi FastText models and metadata. Our model achieves a 0.97 F1 score on coarse grain evaluation on Hostility detection task. Additionally, we built models to identify fake news related to Covid-19 in English tweets. We leverage entity information extracted from the tweets along with textual representations learned from word embeddings and achieve a 0.93 F1 score on the English fake news detection task.
Presenting the Best of CES 2021 winners!
As Wednesday draws to a close, so does a grand social experiment: the first-ever online-only CES. In the end, the experience was invariably different. We particularly missed being able to wander The Sands and have learn about smaller, up-and-coming startups. And if seeing is believing, the oddest entries at the show remained locked behind our computer screen, with no chance of getting hands-on time. And yet, we were kept busy this week. Most of the usual tech giants had news to share, and many of those were able to show us their wares in person, ahead of the three-day gadget extravaganza.
Apple Electronics: Inside the Beatles' eccentric technology subsidiary
Say the word Apple today and we think of Steve Jobs' multi-billion-dollar technology company that spawned the iPhone and the Mac computer. But a decade before the California-based firm was even founded, Apple Electronics, a subsidiary of the Beatles' record label Apple, was working on several pioneering inventions – some of which were precursors of commonly available products today. Apple Electronics was led by Alexis Mardas, a young electronics engineer and inventor originally from Athens in Greece, known to the Beatles as Magic Alex. He died on this day in 2017, aged 74, and was one of the most colourful and mysterious characters in the Beatles' story. Dressed in a white lab coat in his London workshop, Mardas created prototypes of inventions that were set to be marketed and sold. These included the'composing typewriter' – powered by an early example of sound recognition – and a phone with advanced memory capacity.
Video action recognition for lane-change classification and prediction of surrounding vehicles
Biparva, Mahdi, Fernández-Llorca, David, Izquierdo-Gonzalo, Rubén, Tsotsos, John K.
In highway scenarios, an alert human driver will typically anticipate early cut-in/cut-out maneuvers of surrounding vehicles using visual cues mainly. Autonomous vehicles must anticipate these situations at an early stage too, to increase their safety and efficiency. In this work, lane-change recognition and prediction tasks are posed as video action recognition problems. Up to four different two-stream-based approaches, that have been successfully applied to address human action recognition, are adapted here by stacking visual cues from forward-looking video cameras to recognize and anticipate lane-changes of target vehicles. We study the influence of context and observation horizons on performance, and different prediction horizons are analyzed. The different models are trained and evaluated using the PREVENTION dataset. The obtained results clearly demonstrate the potential of these methodologies to serve as robust predictors of future lane-changes of surrounding vehicles proving an accuracy higher than 90% in time horizons of between 1-2 seconds.
Presenting the Best of CES 2021 finalists!
We'll admit, we weren't entirely sure what to expect when we agreed to judge the annual Best of CES Awards without an in-person show. How many companies would show up to an online-only show? What would we lose without being able to wander the halls of a massive convention center and see the products up close? As it turns out, we needn't have worried. More than 1,900 brands, big and small, turned up this year, according to the Consumer Technology Association, the industry group that organizes the show each year. What's more, many companies found socially distant ways to show us their latest and greatest in person, ahead of the show. In the end, we had enough fodder for 14 categories covering hardware and services in every sector from home theater to transportation to accessibility tech. We'll announce the winners tomorrow at 4:30pm ET during a ceremony on our virtual stage, which we'll livestream to Engadget.com We're also continuing tradition and opening up voting for our People's Choice Award -- our reader poll is live now and closes tomorrow, ahead of the ceremony. Please be sure to vote, and congrats to all of the finalists! The technology underpinning the Mudra Band might seem fanciful: sensors capture neural electrical impulses in the wrist and map them onto specific movements like a swipe or a tap, essentially letting you control an Apple Watch with subtle finger movements on one hand. There's no doubt the benefit of convenience -- you can operate your watch when your hands are wet or dirty, for instance.
Sony offers glimpse of its first Airpeak drone that can carry an Alpha camera
From smartphones to TVs, Sony is known for its impressive range of electronic products. Now, the tech giant is turning its attention to drones, launching a new spin-off brand called Airpeak. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone that can be equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system. Sony hopes its new drones will support the creativity of video creators, and is even seeking collaborators to participate in the Airpeak project. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system The Airpeak model shown off at CES features a quadcopter design, with two landing gear extensions that retract upwards during flight.
Socially Responsible AI Algorithms: Issues, Purposes, and Challenges
Cheng, Lu, Varshney, Kush R., Liu, Huan
In the current era, people and society have grown increasingly reliant on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. AI has the potential to drive us towards a future in which all of humanity flourishes. It also comes with substantial risks for oppression and calamity. Discussions about whether we should (re)trust AI have repeatedly emerged in recent years and in many quarters, including industry, academia, health care, services, and so on. Technologists and AI researchers have a responsibility to develop trustworthy AI systems. They have responded with great efforts of designing more responsible AI algorithms. However, existing technical solutions are narrow in scope and have been primarily directed towards algorithms for scoring or classification tasks, with an emphasis on fairness and unwanted bias. To build long-lasting trust between AI and human beings, we argue that the key is to think beyond algorithmic fairness and connect major aspects of AI that potentially cause AI's indifferent behavior. In this survey, we provide a systematic framework of Socially Responsible AI Algorithms that aims to examine the subjects of AI indifference and the need for socially responsible AI algorithms, define the objectives, and introduce the means by which we may achieve these objectives. We further discuss how to leverage this framework to improve societal well-being through protection, information, and prevention/mitigation.