DiPaola, along with Owen and founding team member Kate Hennessy (an associate professor specializing in media at SFU's School of Interactive Arts and Technology) presented their progress to journalists and technology professionals last week at a pair of conferences in New York City. One of the applications the group is most excited about is its use in virtual reality (VR) and 360 degree storytelling. In recent years, the use of VR to create immersive storytelling environments has become increasingly common amongst news organizations worldwide. The Guardian, Al Jazeera, the BBC and The New York Times are just some of the news organizations that have adopted 360 degree video technologies as part of their repertoire. The Star, for instance, used 360-degree video to offer viewers a panoramic experience of the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade.

Global Style Tokens (GSTs) are a recently-proposed method to learn latent disentangled representations of high-dimensional data. GSTs can be used within Tacotron, a state-of-the-art end-to-end text-to-speech synthesis system, to uncover expressive factors of variation in speaking style. In this work, we introduce the Text-Predicted Global Style Token (TP-GST) architecture, which treats GST combination weights or style embeddings as "virtual" speaking style labels within Tacotron. TP-GST learns to predict stylistic renderings from text alone, requiring neither explicit labels during training nor auxiliary inputs for inference. We show that, when trained on a dataset of expressive speech, our system generates audio with more pitch and energy variation than two state-of-the-art baseline models. We further demonstrate that TP-GSTs can synthesize speech with background noise removed, and corroborate these analyses with positive results on human-rated listener preference audiobook tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that multi-speaker TP-GST models successfully factorize speaker identity and speaking style. We provide a website with audio samples for each of our findings.

April 2003 Jobs unveils iTunes, a digital music store that initially only could be accessed on Apple devices. A version that worked on personal computers powered by Windows software came out six months later to broaden the market.

This is a deep discount on some of our favorite earbuds. The Marshall Mode are the top pick in our guide on earbuds that cost less than $100. We wrote, "the Mode have a balanced sound profile that can handle any style of music you throw at them. The bass is slightly boosted, but it's very well represented; there is no bloat or blurriness, even on already bass-forward songs." The lowest price we've seen on our top smart plug.

Consumers lack a full understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and are looking to businesses, government and academia for education, according to a FleishmanHillard report released today. The report highlights that 61% of all those surveyed believe the responsibility for educating the public about AI should be shared. The Future., surveyed consumers across the United States and the United Kingdom about their current sentiment on AI. It also asked a panel of 25 global experts in the AI field to provide their perspectives on the key areas where AI is impacting our world. The result is a snapshot of the public's attitudes on AI that analyzes common fears and opportunities, providing organizations with insights into how their audiences want them to engage going forward.

Reddit users have had their details stolen after a major cyber attack on the firm. A hacker has broken into a few of its systems and taken user data from them, it said. That included current email addresses and a 2007 database that contained old passwords. "Although this was a serious attack, the attacker did not gain write access to Reddit systems; they gained read-only access to some systems that contained backup data, source code and other logs," Reddit's founding engineer Christopher Slowe wrote. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Taryn Southern is a digital artist and filmmaker. She is currently co-directing a documentary about the brain, and her album I AM AI is set to release this September. As a recovering YouTuber, she's produced more than 1000 videos that have garnered more than 500 million views online.

A few decades ago, if you were to think of artificial intelligence, you would most likely automatically think of robots taking over the world or machines that can talk to you. This is probably due to the way AI is depicted in pop culture, as movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and iRobot have become international box-office hits. Although we won't necessarily see robots walking in the street next year, or be fighting wars against cyborgs, Hollywood did get one thing right: AI is officially taking over. Artificial intelligence has extraordinary capabilities of being able to complete tasks that humans just cannot do. We are starting to see AI be incorporated into mainstream business models, due to its vast capacity to be able to process large amounts of data in a fast and efficient way.

Consider a movie studio aiming to produce a set of new movies for summer release: What types of movies it should produce? Who would the movies appeal to? How many movies should it make? Similar issues are encountered by a variety of organizations, e.g., mobile-phone manufacturers and online magazines, who have to create new (non-existent) items to satisfy groups of users with different preferences. In this paper, we present a joint problem formalization of these interrelated issues, and propose generative methods that address these questions simultaneously. Specifically, we leverage the latent space obtained by training a deep generative model---the Variational Autoencoder (VAE)---via a loss function that incorporates both rating performance and item reconstruction terms. We then apply a greedy search algorithm that utilizes this learned latent space to jointly obtain K plausible new items, and user groups that would find the items appealing. An evaluation of our methods on a synthetic dataset indicates that our approach is able to generate novel items similar to highly-desirable unobserved items. As case studies on real-world data, we applied our method on the MART abstract art and Movielens Tag Genome dataset, which resulted in promising results: small and diverse sets of novel items.

First it was age-old board games and boring office jobs, but now it seems robots are gearing up to take over Hollywood. Following up the stunning success of its debut short movie from last year, Sunspring, the script-writing artificial intelligence Benjamin is back with yet another sci-fi flick. Directed by Oscar Sharp and starring Baywatch icon David Hasselhoff, It's No Game takes us to an alternate reality where, in midst of heated writer's strike in Hollywood, AI script writers have gradually began to replace human ones. Using an advanced nanobot technology, producers have found a way to channel the inner thoughts and mannerism of the AI writers directly to human actors, causing them to act out borderline non-sensical lines put together by various algorithms trained on Shakespeare, Aaron Sorkin and Golden Age Hollywood movies. Accompanying Hasselhoff in It's No Game's cast are Flesh and Bone's Sarah Hay, The Walking Dead's Thomas Payne as well as Tom Guinee.