Martin Aspen, the purported author of a September report that tried to link Presidential nominee Joe Biden's family to the Chinese government, was fabricated for the lone purpose of disseminating the information, the man behind the scandal has revealed. Christopher Balding, a blogger and occasional journalist, revealed to NBC News in a piece published Thursday that the identity of the "intelligence" document's co-author, Martin Aspen, was made up. Aspen, previously labeled as a Swiss security analyst, had a profile picture that was generated using computer software. It was an "entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report," Balding said. Public records also do not support Aspen's existence.

I was once asked by a colleague in the Philosophy Department here at Stanford if robot musicians will ever exist, to which I replied that they may -- someday -- but only if we first figure out what it means to have robot philosophers. The exchange was admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it revealed a blind-spot in the way we talk about the future of AI: in our tendency to ask whether or when a given task will be taken over by automation, it is easy to ignore the deeper issue of what such a takeover would mean. We're less concerned with how these tasks are accomplished, and more concerned with the outcome -- generally measured in cost, speed and safety. But when we imagine "automating" a pursuit like music making, we're forced to balance the product of work with something deeper -- the meaning we derive from the process of doing it. Of course, automation is only accelerating in the age of AI, and it's natural to ask how far it will go.

What's New: Today, Intel announced it will acquire SigOpt, a San Francisco-based provider of a leading platform for the optimization of artificial intelligence (AI) software models at scale. SigOpt's AI software technologies deliver productivity and performance gains across hardware and software parameters, use cases and workloads in deep learning, machine learning and data analytics. Intel plans to use SigOpt's software technologies across Intel's AI hardware products to help accelerate, amplify and scale Intel's AI software solution offerings to developers. "In the new intelligence era, AI is driving the compute needs of the future. It is even more important for software to automatically extract the best compute performance while scaling AI models. SigOpt's AI software platform and data science talent will augment Intel software, architecture, product offerings and teams, and provide us with valuable customer insights. We welcome the SigOpt team and its customers to the Intel family."

In the end most teams used smaller models that produced specific parts of a song, like the chords or melodies, and then stitched these together by hand. Uncanny Valley used an algorithm to match up lyrics and melodies that had been produced by different AIs, for example. Another team, Dadabots x Portrait XO, did not want to repeat their chorus twice but couldn't find a way to direct the AI to change the second version. In the end the team used seven models and cobbled together different results to get the variation they wanted. It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, says Huang: "Some teams felt like the puzzle was unreasonably hard, but some found it exhilarating, because they had so many raw materials and colorful puzzle pieces to put together."

People across the world will soon put on scary makeup, terrifying masks and spooky costumes in honor of Halloween, but an algorithm is capable of transforming you into a flesh-eating zombie in just seconds. The website, called MakeMeAZombie,' stems from Toonify's ability to transform portraits into fun-loving cartoons, but has been redesigned to make users look like the undead. The algorithm was trained on a sample of 300 pictures from the internet of people wearing zombie masks and makeup, which were then combined with images of traditional human faces to teach it how to map the ghoulish features. The resulting image shows the person with angry, beady eyes, a mouth of rotten teeth and skin that appears to be decaying. MakeMeAZombie is the brainchild of Josh Brown Kramer, who is a senior data science consultant for Lincoln-based medical AI developer Ocuvera, and has been working on the system for nearly one year.

In theory, AI has blown past our wildest dreams; in practice, Siri can't even tell us the weather. The problem? Creating high-quality datasets to train and measure our models is still incredibly difficult. We should be able to gather 20,000 labels for training a Reddit classifier in a single day, but instead, we wait 3 months and get back a training set full of spam. Surge AI is a team of ML engineers and research scientists building human-AI platforms to solve this. Four years ago, AlphaGo beat the world's Go experts, big tech was acqui-hiring every ML startup they could get their hands on, and the New York Times declared that "machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself".

Now may be a great time to pick up that Amazon device you've been eyeing, because the e-commerce giant is selling several Echo Show and Fire TV models at deep discounts to celebrate Alexa's birthday. Amazon first announced the voice assistant in 2014, and it's celebrating its sixth birthday on November 6th -- think of these deals as an extended sale that makes the devices available at much lower prices, some of them being all-time lows. The Echo Show 8, to start with, now only costs $65, or half what it usually costs. It's out of stock at the moment and won't start shipping until November 20th, but purchasing it now means you can get it at the lowest price it's ever been. We gave the 8-inch version of the company's line of smart displays a score of 85 in our review, praising it for delivering crisp and vibrant images and for having an impressive audio quality.

From text-reading applications for blind people to cancer screening with machine vision and early detection of disease outbreaks – AI can make this world a little bit better. But how to get started with your first AI for a good project. Developers and Data Scientists working on ideas that benefit society can, in the process, cultivate their skills and develop their careers. It creates opportunities to work on exciting stuff that might not be part of your regular day to day work, and what starts as a weekend project can someday become your dream job. It is essential to start with a problem in mind.

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InfoTalk Corporation Limited, a leader in conversational artificial intelligence technologies, today announced receiving the Gold Award from the Hong Kong ICT Awards for its flagship product, InfoTalk-Speaker 10.0. This Version 10 leapfrogs text-to-speech technology to a new frontier, enabling computers, robots, and any automated systems to speak in natural human voices like those in sci-fi movies. It opens up a whole new horizon for uncharted waters of digital applications. InfoTalk-Speaker is available in multiple languages. It speaks with the tonal precision of human native speakers of Cantonese and Putonghua.