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.

Bokeh effect is used in photography to capture images where the closer objects look sharp and every-thing else stays out-of-focus. Bokeh photos are generally captured using Single Lens Reflex cameras using shallow depth-of-field. Most of the modern smartphones can take bokeh images by leveraging dual rear cameras or a good auto-focus hardware. However, for smartphones with single-rear camera without a good auto-focus hardware, we have to rely on software to generate bokeh images. This kind of system is also useful to generate bokeh effect in already captured images. In this paper, an end-to-end deep learning framework is proposed to generate high-quality bokeh effect from images. The original image and different versions of smoothed images are blended to generate Bokeh effect with the help of a monocular depth estimation network. The proposed approach is compared against a saliency detection based baseline and a number of approaches proposed in AIM 2019 Challenge on Bokeh Effect Synthesis. Extensive experiments are shown in order to understand different parts of the proposed algorithm. The network is lightweight and can process an HD image in 0.03 seconds. This approach ranked second in AIM 2019 Bokeh effect challenge-Perceptual Track.

Upgrading from a smart speaker (like the Echo Dot) to a smart display (like the Echo Show) can be a game-changer. With a display, you can have recipes at your fingertips in the kitchen, a multi-functional digital photo frame in your living room, and easily enjoy a hands-free video chat from anywhere in the house. You can also quickly see information like the outside temperature and control your smart light switches and door locks from the touch screen. But smart displays are also great for watching your favorite shows while you work, whether you're cooking in the kitchen or putting away laundry in the bedroom. There's just one caveat: Different devices support different streaming platforms.

Orson Welles, who knew a thing or two about making movies, reportedly remarked after touring the RKO lot that it was "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had." And yet it is rare to see a feature film that communicates any of that delight, any of the sheer fun of playing around with the possibilities the medium offers. The Vast of Night, the debut feature from director Andrew Patterson and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, arriving on Amazon Prime on May 29, is one of the exceptions: Every scene has been staged and shot with intelligence, intent, inventiveness, and a sense of play. To watch it is to get excited about the billions of different ways you can combine sound and moving images to tell a story. That is not to say that you'll necessarily be astounded by the story The Vast of Night is telling.