How Americans vote today will determine who sits in government for at least the next two years--but tonight's outcome will shape policy for years to come. With hundreds of key races nationwide, some of which are poised to significantly shift long-established state and national leadership, the 2018 midterm elections will be one to watch. Here's how you can stay informed before, during, and after tonight's midterm elections. First: Have you voted yet? If you're heading to the polls, consider a few of these resources to help you make sense of the salient issues of this year, and find more information about voting.

Before it was even released, Homecoming was notable for many reasons. For one, it was the new project from Mr. Robot mastermind Sam Esmail. For another, it marked Julia Roberts' first turn leading an episodic television show. And finally, the Amazon original series was one of Hollywood's first big bets on adapting podcasts for the screen. Sam Esmail's Homecoming Is Nothing Like Mr. Robot Where Is Hollywood Looking for Its Next Hit?

Those rumors of a Super Mario Bros. animated movie in development? In a chat with Variety, Illumination founder Chris Meledandri confirmed that the animated flick was in "priority development" with hopes of putting it in theaters by 2022. And yes, Shigeru Miyamoto is involved -- the iconic game designer is "front and center" in the process, Meledandri said. The involvement of the series creator will theoretically add depth to the (frankly rather threadbare) plot without souring the spirit and producing a fiasco like the 1993 live-action flick. Provided the movie continues forward, it's not clear how well it'll fare.

Artificial Intelligence is continually being used in more and more areas. Now, 20th Century Fox has been using A.I. in attempts to figure out what movies people will go and watch. They even gave the A.I. program a name: Merlin. Merlin is still a bit of a work in progress, but it is proving to be decent at its job. Merlin's job is to watch movie trailers and tag different aspects.

Artificial Intelligence is a field of computer science that consists of the construction of intelligent machines that are put into operation through computer programs. The purpose of building these gadgets or robots is to replace human intelligence to a certain extent by doing more than one action. AI is a new area under development and has a particular focus on the banking system and the way it operates. Of the most influential sectors are customer service, financial services, and fraud detection. Artificial Intelligence can make banking services automate and thus perform much faster than people.

Tweets featuring "MAGA" and "QAnon" are largely driven by automated behavior.Omar Marques/SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire When President Donald Trump tweeted about a caravan of immigrants heading to the US border in late October, it set off a wildfire of misinformation on social media. Posts on Facebook and Twitter spread conspiracy theories that Democratic donor George Soros was funding the migrants and the false allegation that the group included terrorists and gang members. It turns out it wasn't just Republicans latching on the story--it was also Twitter bots. Mother Jones partnered with RoBhat Labs, a non-partisan social media firm that reports bot activity, to show the scope of disinformation circulating on Twitter before the election. In order to detect automated, bot-like behavior, RoBhat collects sample tweets from Twitter's application programming interface and runs them through a machine learning model.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. The most wonderful time of the year is almost upon us, but first, you have to make it through one of the most trying times of the year: gift-buying season. You probably have an idea of what you're going to get your partner, your mom, and your siblings, but what do you get for your nieces, nephews, and other little ones in your life? Shopping for children can be an especially tough task if you don't have kids yourself, as you're likely clueless to what's trendy among today's youth.

Artificial Intelligence, or Al, is changing the way we think about news and technology. A newly developed software using audio clips to create fake video renderings was debuted last year. Then, earlier this year, comedian Jordan Peele teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a video, using this AI program, of President Barack Obama making some implausible comments. The video highlights concerns concerned the capabilities of AI, and what this could mean for the recurring topic of "fake news." What we commonly know as "gay-dar" or the ability to determine someone's sexuality based off appearance has been actualized by a new artificial intelligence program.

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are at the core of modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In particular, long-short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in many speech recognition tasks, due to their efficient representation of long and short term dependencies in sequences of inter-dependent features. Nonetheless, internal dependencies within the element composing multidimensional features are weakly considered by traditional real-valued representations. We propose a novel quaternion long-short term memory (QLSTM) recurrent neural network that takes into account both the external relations between the features composing a sequence, and these internal latent structural dependencies with the quaternion algebra. QLSTMs are compared to LSTMs during a memory copy-task and a realistic application of speech recognition on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dataset. QLSTM reaches better performances during the two experiments with up to $2.8$ times less learning parameters, leading to a more expressive representation of the information.

Explaining consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. Recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that a solution could be within reach – but grasping it will mean rethinking some familiar ideas. Consciousness, I argue in a new paper, may be caused by the way the brain generates loops of energetic feedback, similar to the video feedback that'blossoms' when a video camera is pointed at its own output. I first saw video feedback in the late 1980s and was instantly entranced. A Cardiff University professor says consciousness could may be caused by the way the brain generates loops of'energetic feedback' rather like a video feedback loop.