Virgin Media is the worst broadband provider in the UK for leaving customers without internet, according to new research. The publication of the research comes amid another major outage of Virgin Media TV services across the UK. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view. Virgin Media customers reported problems with their TV on Thursday.

Amazon has brought Apple Music to Alexa smart speakers for the first time in the UK. The feature was already available in the US but is slowly rolling out across the world. It means that people are no longer limited to only Amazon Music and Spotify as ways for Alexa to play music. Apple Music will work like those same services, allowing people to ask for a song or radio station and have it play from Apple Music. We'll tell you what's true.

Twitter has been forced to backtrack after the French government accidentally fell foul of its own law designed to prevent the spread of fake news. The #OuiJeVote (Yes, I Vote) campaign was rejected by the social media giant as it risked contravening a law introduced in December, that requires paid-for political content on the platform to be transparent about who funds it, even though the campaign is aimed at encouraging people to vote. Twitter's decision was criticised by the French government information service (GIS), which planned to pay for the sponsored tweets. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Submissions for HCOMP-19 Are Due in June! The Seventh AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2019) will be held October 28-30 at Skamania Lodge in Washington State near the Columbia Gorge River, just 45 minutes from Portland, Oregon. This year is the 10-year anniversary of the very first HCOMP workshop in Paris, and to celebrate, there will be special events, talks, and panels throughout the conference. HCOMP is the premier venue for disseminating the latest research findings on crowdsourcing and human computation. While artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) represent traditional mainstays of the conference, HCOMP believes strongly in inviting, fostering, and promoting broad, interdisciplinary research.

Defense and security organizations depend upon science and technology to meet operational needs, predict and counter threats, and meet increasingly complex demands of modern warfare. Artificial intelligence and robotics could provide solutions to a wide range of military gaps and deficiencies. At the same time, the unique and rapidly evolving nature of AI and robotics challenges existing polices, regulations, and values, and introduces complex ethical issues that might impede their development, evaluation, and use by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Early consideration of potential ethical issues raised by military use of emerging AI and robotics technologies in development is critical to their effective implementation. This article presents an ethics assessment framework for emerging AI and robotics technologies. It is designed to help technology developers, policymakers, decision makers, and other stakeholders identify and broadly consider potential ethical issues that might arise with the military use and integration of emerging AI and robotics technologies of interest. We also provide a contextual environment for our framework, as well as an example of how our framework can be applied to a specific technology. Finally, we briefly identify and address several pervasive issues that arose during our research.

Although various linear log-distance path loss models have been developed, advanced models are requiring to more accurately and flexibly represent the path loss for complex environments such as the urban area. This letter proposes an artificial neural network (ANN) based multi-dimensional regression framework for path loss modeling in urban environments at 3 to 6 GHz frequency band. ANN is used to learn the path loss structure from the measured path loss data which is a function of distance and frequency. The effect of the network architecture parameter (activation function, the number of hidden layers and nodes) on the prediction accuracy are analyzed. We observe that the proposed model is more accurate and flexible compared to the conventional linear model.

Aerial filming is becoming more and more popular thanks to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose an intelligent agent which supervises motion planning of a filming drone based on aesthetical values of video shots using deep reinforcement learning. Unlike the current state-of-the-art approaches which mostly require explicit guidance by a human expert, our drone learns how to make favorable shot type selections by experience. We propose a learning scheme which exploits aesthetical features of retrospective shots in order to extract a desirable policy for better prospective shots. We train our agent in realistic AirSim simulations using both hand-crafted and human reward functions. We deploy the same agent on a real DJI M210 drone in order to test generalization capability of our approach to real world conditions. To evaluate the success of our approach in the end, we conduct a comprehensive user study in which participants rate the shots taken using our method and write comments about them.

A series of short documentaries on the future and implications of AI and robotics made by Dr Beth Singler, produced and directed by DragonLight Films, and with funding from the Faraday Institute, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, the Economic and Social Research Council, and ARM, are available through the Cambridge University's Youtube Channel:

Singer John Legend is the newest voice of the Google Assistant, the tech company announced Wednesday. Google Assistant users, get ready to have the silky voice of John Legend in your home. The tech company on Wednesday announced the 40-year-old singer as the voice of its virtual assistant for a limited time in the U.S. Legend's voice will be able to give users the weather forecast, sing happy birthday and tell jokes. His voice will also tell you a few things about the singer's personal life, including about his wife, Chrissy Teigen. There will also be a few Easter eggs.

I get that there's too much TV, I really do. Even so, I can't understand why no one's been talking about Black Monday, the Showtime comedy about Wall Street in the '80s that stars Don Cheadle and Regina Hall. On some level I want to punish those of you who haven't given the show a chance, but instead I'm going to politely ask that, seeing as the first season ended Sunday, you watch the whole thing: Now that it's waiting for you in one bingeable chunk, you really have no excuse. Its co-creator David Caspe (of the fan favorite Happy Endings) suggested as much in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that doubled as a pitch for viewers to consider a bender: "A lot of times if you don't break out right away in a crazy way, it's between seasons one and two that people find stuff. The show is obviously written as incredibly serialized, and I think in some ways getting to watch a few in a row might be helpful for a viewer."