NEC has partnered with dotData, a Silicon Valley venture in the automation of data science, to deliver artificial intelligence and data analytics solutions to the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMBC Group) for its financial solutions. NEC has secured an exclusive license of dotData platform to provide this software across Japan. Since 2016, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, NEC and the dotData team have been actively working to integrate AI into banking operations to develop new service offerings. As a result of this successful collaboration, the SMBC Group has decided to use dotData platform across the five group companies. Using dotData platform, the SMBC Group wants to deal with issues such as the marketing of various financial products, including credit cards and housing loans.

Researchers from the University of Southern California, Pinscreen, and Microsoft developed a deep learning-based method that can generate full 3D hair geometry from single-view images in real time. This is the first deep learning project that can render hair in real time, the team said. "Realistic hair modeling is one of the most difficult tasks when digitizing virtual humans," the researchers said. "In contrast to objects that are easily parameterizable, like the human face, hair spans a wide range of shape variations and can be highly complex due to its volumetric structure and level of deformability in each strand." Using NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPUs with the cuDNN-accelerated PyTorch deep learning framework, the researchers trained their convolutional neural network on a dataset comprised of over 40,000 different hairstyles and 160,000 corresponding 2D orientation images rendered from random views.

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YouTube erected a platform where commoners could climb the ladder to stardom. Now, the video-sharing giant is seeing another wave of new talent diving into a glittering entertainment scene. These entertainers are called "virtual YouTubers," or "VTubers," and are represented by digital avatars that look like anime characters. Almost exclusively a Japanese phenomenon, at least so far, these virtual talents have proliferated rapidly over the past several months and people in the industry, together with observers, predict the movement will only accelerate. Following are some questions and answers about virtual YouTubers.

Impact of AI in the Digital and Broadcast Media Industry Impact of'Digitization' in the media space is likely to put over half a trillion USD at stake, as per industry estimates.The digital paradigm in the media industry is expected to restructure the entire business model. In the digital age, user experience has moved away from being content driven to'on-demand' delivery, offered in a device of consumer choice.Emphasis in the coming years is likely to be placed at the intersection of content, technology, and user experience. A number of emerging technologies are disrupting existing business models within the media industry and are offering new opportunities, which traditional enterprises are only beginning to acknowledge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being increasingly used to transform the way media houses create content and present them to viewers.AI, by virtue of its data driven intelligence and self-learning abilities, can be used to automate repetitive skill-based jobs. Additionally, AI can power the development of superior prediction engines that offer cutting-edge analytics and business intelligence to media enterprises globally.

Facial recognition tech is becoming more sophisticated, with some firms claiming it can even read our emotions and detect suspicious behaviour. But what implications does this have for privacy and civil liberties? Facial recognition tech has been around for decades, but it has been progressing in leaps and bounds in recent years due to advances in computing vision and artificial intelligence (AI), tech experts say. It is now being used to identify people at borders, unlock smart phones, spot criminals, and authenticate banking transactions. But some tech firms are claiming it can also assess our emotional state.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will create as many jobs in the UK as it will displace over the next 20 years, a report has claimed. The analysis by accountancy giant PwC found AI would boost economic growth, creating new roles as others fell away. But it warned there would be "winners and losers" by industry sector, with many jobs likely to change. Opinion is split over AI's potential impact, with some warning it could leave many out of work in future. The pessimists argue AI is different to previous forms of technological change, because robots and algorithms will be able to do intellectual as well as routine physical tasks.

Score following is the process of tracking a musical performance (audio) with respect to a known symbolic representation (a score). We start this paper by formulating score following as a multimodal Markov Decision Process, the mathematical foundation for sequential decision making. Given this formal definition, we address the score following task with state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as synchronous advantage actor critic (A2C). In particular, we design multimodal RL agents that simultaneously learn to listen to music, read the scores from images of sheet music, and follow the audio along in the sheet, in an end-to-end fashion. All this behavior is learned entirely from scratch, based on a weak and potentially delayed reward signal that indicates to the agent how close it is to the correct position in the score. Besides discussing the theoretical advantages of this learning paradigm, we show in experiments that it is in fact superior compared to previously proposed methods for score following in raw sheet music images.

Machine learning is the idea that describes computers that can essentially "learn" and process new information without specifically being programed to do so. If you give a computer a task, it will more-or-less get better at that task the more it has a chance to engage in it. Object detection is a subset of this idea and is of particular relevance to photos. Not only does object detection let you know which objects are in a photo (hence the name), it also gives you insight into precisely where they are, too. But out of all the industries and activities where object detection is poised to make a big impact, drone services are undoubtedly right at the top.

The tech giants are racing to get digital assistants into our homes - the Amazon Echo Dot currently has a 40% discount during Amazon Prime Day - but debate rages over whether they are suitable for children. There have certainly been teething problems. Toy giant Mattel abandoned its "AI babysitter", Aristotle, last year following privacy concerns. And music streaming service Spotify is currently testing a way of filtering out songs with explicit lyrics following complaints from parents that family-friendly versions of tracks did not play by default when requested on smart speakers. Amazon Echo meanwhile added a feature to encourage children to be more polite to it following concerns that the abrupt way in which people talk to it was teaching children to be rude.