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Hollywood movie production grinds to a halt after possible virus causes Mac computers to shutdown

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Mac computers running the movie-editing software, Avid, have been shutting down without explanation across movie studios in Hollywood. The mass shut downs were first reported by Variety and may indicate the existence of a possible computer virus, though the cause still remains unclear. Once the computers spontaneously shut down, users are reportedly not able to reboot the machines, meaning affected studios have seen post-production efforts come to a grinding halt. Variety reports that several film editors and studios have reported experiencing the problem and took to social media to voice their concerns. 'Lot of L.A. post shops and people out on shows having their Macs slowly crash,' tweeted video post-production consultant Matt Penn.


Amazon announces several new models of Echo and feature that changes Alexa to Samuel L. Jackson

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Amazon has release a flurry of new hardware and software updates that expand on its popular series of Echo smart speakers and transform Alexa into celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson. For the first time ever, Amazon announced that it is letting Echo users turn Alexa into celebrities for a'special price' of $0.99 for anyone that purchased a speaker in 2019. Samuel L. Jackson will be among the first celebrities voice integrations and will come in both explicit (presumably with lots of f-bombs) and clean versions. More celebrities are set to arrive on the device, though Amazon hasn't yet hinted at who those additions may be. The first-ever high-end smart speaker from Amazon will be called the Echo Studio and is being positioned as a companion to the company's HD streaming service The company also announced new additions to its Echo hardware, including its first-ever high-end smart speaker which it's calling the'Echo Studio.'



UC Explores Artificial Intelligence in Film Series at Esquire Theatre

#artificialintelligence

A programmer at an internet-search company, Caleb Smith, wins a competition to spend a week at the CEO's estate, tucked away in the mountains. But he learns that he was chosen to be the human half of a Turing Test, a method of determining if a computer is capable of thinking like a real person. Tasked with evaluating Ava, a beautiful cutting-edge robot, they soon find that she is capable of more than they could have conceived. Her - Oct. 14, 7 p.m. Set in a near future in sunny Los Angeles, 2013's Her -- Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay -- follows Theodore Twombly, a recently-divorced man who writes personal letters for other people for a living. Lonely and mourning his relationship, he begins using an advanced operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) -- think Amazon's Alexa or Google Home -- to which he forms a strong bond.


Dynamic Search -- Optimizing the Game of Information Seeking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article presents the emerging topic of dynamic search (DS). To position dynamic search in a larger research landscape, the article discusses in detail its relationship to related research topics and disciplines. The article reviews approaches to modeling dynamics during information seeking, with an emphasis on Reinforcement Learning (RL)-enabled methods. Details are given for how different approaches are used to model interactions among the human user, the search system, and the environment. The paper ends with a review of evaluations of dynamic search systems.


Environment Sound Classification using Multiple Feature Channels and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

--In this paper, we propose a model for the Environment Sound Classification T ask (ESC) that consists of multiple feature channels given as input to a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The novelty of the paper lies in using multiple feature channels consisting of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCC), the Constant Q-transform (CQT) and Chromagram. Such multiple features have never been used before for signal or audio processing. Also, we employ a deeper CNN (DCNN) compared to previous models, consisting of 2D separable convolutions working on time and feature domain separately. The model also consists of max pooling layers that downsample time and feature domain separately. We use some data augmentation techniques to further boost performance. Our model is able to achieve state-of- the-art performance on all three benchmark environment sound classification datasets, i.e. the UrbanSound8K (97.35%), T o the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a single environment sound classification model is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. For ESC-10 and ESC-50 datasets, the accuracy achieved by the proposed model is beyond human accuracy of 95.7% and 81.3% respectively. I NTRODUCTION T HERE are many important applications related to speech and audio processing. One of the most important application is the Environment Sound Classification (ESC) that deals with distinguishing between sounds from the real environment. It is a complex task that involves classifying a sound event into an appropriate class such as siren, dog barking, airplane, people talking etc. This task is quite different compared to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) [1], since environment sound features differ drastically from speech sounds. In ASR, speech is converted to text. However, in ESC, there is no such thing as speech, just sounds. So, ESC models are quite different compared to ASR models.



A Database of 100,000 AI Generated Faces Is Changing the Way We Think about Stock Photos

#artificialintelligence

You have to admit it. Some of the uses of artificial intelligence are simply fascinating. One of the more exciting aspects of artificial intelligence is seeing all the potential ways the technology can be applied to our daily lives, even if it at times it seems a little creepy. We have seen artificial intelligence technology shape everything from the medical world to art. However, did you ever think that AI would go on to shape the world of stock images?


Expert: AI, Algorithms Should Come with a Measure of Caution

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Kartik Hosanagar was ready to turn his home into one of the future. He was looking forward to connecting his thermostat, television, light bulbs and other Internet-enabled smart devices and control all of them with a phone, tablet or just his voice. Hosanagar, a technology and digital business professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, had everything hooked up and the new arrangement went fine for several months -- until one day his television started turning itself on and off. It turned out that a friend who had helped Hosanagar set up his smart home still had access to his home and was inadvertently controlling his TV from his home. "Sometime during the setup, we switched to his phone and used the TV app to set it up," Hosanagar said.


Artificial intelligence's genuine impact

#artificialintelligence

Automation is affecting every aspect of modern living and TV is no different. Jonathan Easton examines the role that AI is playing in the user experience and how'the algorithm' has quietly revolutionised the way we view content. Every few years, a new fad takes the industry by storm. In the early part of this decade it was 3D, and after that it was virtual reality, augmented reality and everything in between. But artificial intelligence (AI) is no such fad.