Over the past five years, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have released a trio of amazing low-budget sci-fi/horror films: Resolution, Spring, and The Endless. Science fiction author Christopher Cevasco says that what sets these films apart is their focus on compelling characters. "The performances have to be really strong to pull off movies like these," Cevasco says in Episode 339 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. You're immediately pulled in by the characters." Benson and Moorhead are real-life friends, which definitely shows in the way that they portray male friendship. For writer Sara Lynn Michener, that's a welcome change from horror movies in which the characters are both disposable and detestable. "I really appreciate that they are putting a lot of emotionally intelligent male characters in their films," she says. "We see a lot of stereotypical male behavior in film, and it's really lovely to see a film about a man taking care of his friend." Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley hopes to see more low-budget sci-fi films like The Endless. "I just think this should be so inspiring to other filmmakers, that you can make movies like Resolution for $3,000 and have 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes," he says. "This is a model for other people who want to do that." Benson and Moorhead are currently at work on a bigger-budget movie, Synchronic, starring Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie. TV writer Andrea Kail hopes the new film is able to maintain the same sensibility as their earlier work. "I just hope they retain their creative independence, because they're amazing storytellers, and that should be encouraged, and not reined in by a bunch of idiot studio executives," she says. Listen to the complete interview with Christopher Cevasco, Sara Lynn Michener, and Andrea Kail in Episode 339 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below. "Let me say this--and I'm sure NYU will come after me now--but if you want to be a filmmaker, don't go to film school.

We consider the problem of estimating human pose and trajectory by an aerial robot with a monocular camera in near real time. We present a preliminary solution whose distinguishing feature is a dynamic classifier selection architecture. In our solution, each video frame is corrected for perspective using projective transformation. Then, two alternative feature sets are used: (i) Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) of the silhouette, (ii) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features of the RGB image. The features (HOG or CNN) are classified using a dynamic classifier. A class is defined as a pose-viewpoint pair, and a total of 64 classes are defined to represent a forward walking and turning gait sequence. Our solution provides three main advantages: (i) Classification is efficient due to dynamic selection (4-class vs. 64-class classification). (ii) Classification errors are confined to neighbors of the true view-points. (iii) The robust temporal relationship between poses is used to resolve the left-right ambiguities of human silhouettes. Experiments conducted on both fronto-parallel videos and aerial videos confirm our solution can achieve accurate pose and trajectory estimation for both scenarios. We found using HOG features provides higher accuracy than using CNN features. For example, applying the HOG-based variant of our scheme to the 'walking on a figure 8-shaped path' dataset (1652 frames) achieved estimation accuracies of 99.6% for viewpoints and 96.2% for number of poses.

Listen up, Apple Music subscribers--HomePod isn't the only smart speaker that can handle your tunes anymore. Apple has teamed up with Amazon to allow streaming on Echo devices, so all of your songs, albums, and playlists are good to go. Here's how to set it all up: Setting up Apple Music on your Echo device takes just a few taps. Now you can say, "Alexa, play'Imagine' by Ariana Grande on Apple Music" and it'll start playing. You can also ask Alexa to stream playlists, charts, and Beats 1 radio.

The mix of software and services and higher prices are key to Apple's effort to offset slowing iPhone unit sales. Though the company reported record annual revenue on Nov. 1 due to higher iPhone prices, it also said it would stop reporting the number of iPhones sold--a metric that has been stagnant lately--a decision that many analysts interpreted as signaling the iPhone's growth years are in the past. Apple's stock price has declined by nearly a quarter since then. While the push beyond its Silicon Valley home could aid those efforts, it also will test a highly centralized company that has thrived due to a concentrated workforce located near its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, analysts said. "This idea of'Designed in Cupertino' has really been the ethos of Apple, and now you're going to have AI and services designed outside Cupertino," said Gene Munster, managing partner at investment and research firm Loup Ventures.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made the transition from once being a glorious manifestation of sci-fi imagination to today emerging as a technological reality capable of disrupting industries. In an increasingly hypercompetitive business environment, the marketing function is no exception to the application of AI. In fact, in a recent PwC study, 72% of the marketers interviewed, consider AI as a "business advantage". When actionable data is considered the fulcrum for growth, the modern marketer barely utilises 5% of the customer-centric data -- that often exists in straitjacketed silos -- at his disposal. This is where Artificial Intelligence Marketing comes into the picture.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 12th International Conference on Web and Social Media (AAAI-18) was held at Stanford University, Stanford, California USA, on Monday, June 25, 2018. There were fourteen workshops in the program: Algorithmic Personalization and News: Risks and Opportunities; Beyond Online Data: Tackling Challenging Social Science Questions; Bridging the Gaps: Social Media, Use and Well-Being; Chatbot; Data-Driven Personas and Human-Driven Analytics: Automating Customer Insights in the Era of Social Media;  Designed Data for Bridging the Lab and the Field: Tools, Methods, and Challenges in Social Media Experiments; Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media; Event Analytics Using Social Media Data; Exploring Ethical Trade-Offs in Social Media Research; Making Sense of Online Data for Population Research; News and Public Opinion; Social Media and Health: A Focus on Methods for Linking Online and Offline Data; Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring and The ICWSM Science Slam. Workshops were held on the first day of the conference. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus — providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers, and users on topics of current interest. Organizers from nine of the  workshops submitted reports, which are reproduced in this report. Brief summaries of the other five workshops have been reproduced from their website descriptions.

Monitoring the environment with artificial intelligence … in samples, and then exploit this considerable amount of data with artificial intelligence.

Ag-tech firm Indigo Ag has bought a company that uses satellites and artificial intelligence to operate a "living map'' of the world's food supply, Indigo …

There is a lot of hype for the accomplishments of Artificial Intelligence. Nextbigfuture keeps you up to date about the achievements made in AI.