Dozens of journalists have been sacked after Microsoft decided to replace with them with artificial intelligence software. Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft's MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told that they will be no longer be required because robots can now do their jobs. Around 27 individuals employed by PA Media – formerly the Press Association – were told on Thursday that they would lose their jobs in a month's time after Microsoft decided to stop employing humans to select, edit and curate news articles on its homepages. Employees were told Microsoft's decision to end the contract with PA Media was taken at short notice as part of a global shift away from humans in favour of automated updates for news. One staff member who worked on the team said: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."

Movie genre classification is a challenging task that has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. In this paper, we addressed the multi-label classification of the movie genres in a multimodal way. For this purpose, we created a dataset composed of trailer video clips, subtitles, synopses, and movie posters taken from 152,622 movie titles from The Movie Database. The dataset was carefully curated and organized, and it was also made available as a contribution of this work. Each movie of the dataset was labeled according to a set of eighteen genre labels. We extracted features from these data using different kinds of descriptors, namely Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Statistical Spectrum Descriptor , Local Binary Pattern with spectrograms, Long-Short Term Memory, and Convolutional Neural Networks. The descriptors were evaluated using different classifiers, such as BinaryRelevance and ML-kNN. We have also investigated the performance of the combination of different classifiers/features using a late fusion strategy, which obtained encouraging results. Based on the F-Score metric, our best result, 0.628, was obtained by the fusion of a classifier created using LSTM on the synopses, and a classifier created using CNN on movie trailer frames. When considering the AUC-PR metric, the best result, 0.673, was also achieved by combining those representations, but in addition, a classifier based on LSTM created from the subtitles was used. These results corroborate the existence of complementarity among classifiers based on different sources of information in this field of application. As far as we know, this is the most comprehensive study developed in terms of the diversity of multimedia sources of information to perform movie genre classification.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Watching the creation of an iconic music video is always great, especially when it's the Making of Michael Jackson's In The Closet, upscaled to HD! Find where to find download links on the pinned comment! Peach Restores is a project using Artificial Intelligence to upscale and improve the video quality of short films, music videos and live performances!

Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report. The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists. Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times. Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business. The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."

Dozens of journalists have been sacked after Microsoft decided to replace them with artificial intelligence software. Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft's MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told that they will be no longer be required because robots can now do their jobs. Around 27 individuals employed by PA Media – formerly the Press Association – were told on Thursday that they would lose their jobs in a month's time after Microsoft decided to stop employing humans to select, edit and curate news articles on its homepages. Employees were told Microsoft's decision to end the contract with PA Media was taken at short notice as part of a global shift away from humans in favour of automated updates for news. One staff member who worked on the team said: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."

"I would say everyone has read at least once an algorithmically produced article," said Robert Weissgraeber, CTO and Managing Director of AX Semantics. In many cases, readers don't see a difference between human- and bot-authored copy, Weissgraeber told Built In. His company, AX Semantics, is one of several -- including Narrative Science and Automated Insights -- exploring natural language generation, or automated writing. The technology can be used to generate product descriptions, quarterly earnings reports, fantasy football recaps and journalism. The Washington Post, for instance, has developed an AI-enabled bot, Heliograf, that helps generate election and sports coverage.

Facebook executives took the decision to end research that would make the social media site less polarising for fears that it would unfairly target right-wing users, according to new reports. The company also knew that its recommendation algorithm exacerbated divisiveness, leaked internal research from 2016 appears to indicate. Building features to combat that would require the company to sacrifice engagement – and by extension, profit – according to a later document from 2018 which described the proposals as "antigrowth" and requiring "a moral stance." "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," a 2018 presentation warned, warning that if action was not taken Facebook would provide users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, in 2017 and 2018 Facebook conducted research through newly created "Integrity Teams" to tackle extremist content and a cross-jurisdictional task force dubbed "Common Ground."

Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine the utility (e.g. exposure, revenue) for the item providers (e.g. publishers, sellers, artists, studios). It has already been noted that myopically optimizing utility to the users, as done by virtually all learning-to-rank algorithms, can be unfair to the item providers. We, therefore, present a learning-to-rank approach for explicitly enforcing merit-based fairness guarantees to groups of items (e.g. articles by the same publisher, tracks by the same artist). In particular, we propose a learning algorithm that ensures notions of amortized group fairness, while simultaneously learning the ranking function from implicit feedback data. The algorithm takes the form of a controller that integrates unbiased estimators for both fairness and utility, dynamically adapting both as more data becomes available. In addition to its rigorous theoretical foundation and convergence guarantees, we find empirically that the algorithm is highly practical and robust.

The partnership launched Thursday after a virtual meeting between national technology ministers. It was nearly two years after the leaders of Canada and France announced they were forming a group to guide the responsible adoption of AI based on shared principles of "human rights, inclusion, diversity, innovation and economic growth."

As scientists and researchers strive harder to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) mainstream, this ingenious technology is already making its way to our day to day lives and continues ushering across several industry verticals. From voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa to autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles, AI has been rearing itself as a force to be reckoned with. Many tech giants such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been making huge bets on the long-term growth potential of Artificial Intelligence. According to a report published by the research firm Markets and Markets, the AI market is expected to grow to a $190 billion industry by 2025. More and more businesses are looking to boost their ROI by leveraging the capabilities of AI.