Remember the movie "The Imitation Game"? The tragic story of a brilliant man who decrypted secret German Enigma messages, indirectly shortened World War II, saved millions of lives, and was later charged for homosexuality, forced to undergo chemical treatment, and ended his life shortly after? The real Alan Turing accomplished many more brilliant miracles than this. He also published papers on theories of artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, the title "The Imitation Game" had little to do with the movie. It was a game he mentioned in one of his papers where humans will one day engineer a machine to imitate humans so well that a human on the other side of the room will be fooled he was communicating with another human. Turing was a pioneer in the field of computer science. Only after his death would he be known as the father of AI.

Last September, the world welcomed Juggalos (or Juggalettes, depending on which you prefer) to The Resistance when they marched on Washington en masse to protest the policies of the Trump administration. As if they weren't already doing the absolute most, the die-hard fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse have become accidental heroes for people concerned about facial recognition tech: According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology. In a series of follow-up tweets, @tahkion explained that facial recognition works by pinpointing the areas of contrast on a human face--for instance, where a nose is located, or where the chin becomes the neck. As it happens, juggalo makeup often involves applying black paint below the mouth, but above the chin. That makes facial recognition vulnerable to misidentifying the placement of the jaw.

Sabio, the Leaders in App Science, today announced the appointment of Dr. Jike Chong, Chief Data Scientist at Acorns, to its advisory board. Dr. Chong brings, to Sabio, extensive experience advising companies on how Artificial Intelligence can help solve the problems facing multiple industry verticals. Commenting on the appointment, Aziz Rahim, CEO of Sabio, stated, "Adding someone of Dr. Jike Chong's caliber to our advisory board further validates our business and approach to helping companies exceed their marketing goals through improved data analytics and insights. Dr. Jike Chong's contributions will enable us to continue empowering our clients with predictive business intelligence that gives a competitive advantage to today's mobile savvy marketers. We look forward to the strategic guidance Dr. Chong will provide Sabio's rapidly growing customer base and business."

Artificial Intelligence has been showing its presence in almost every field from sports to weather. But something that has long been coming and expected is the implementation of AI in news. News media has always been a target for Artificial Intelligence. And especially that is something that is needed more than ever before. Today, news organisations, let alone the regular person determine which news is trustworthy and which is not.

You've just noticed a great price on an Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home Mini smart speaker. The prices are intended to make them impulse purchases, because both Amazon and Google are desperate to get their foot in the door of your home. Voice assistants and smart home automation are expected to be the next big thing in tech, and both companies know that once you experience the convenience of a smart speaker in one room, you're likely to want it in others. Before making a purchase, you really should do your homework. It all comes down to the hardware, the capabilities of their digital assistants, and the way they can do things such as play music and control other smart devices in your home.

What do machine learning practitioners actually do? Written: 12 Jul 2018 by Rachel Thomas This post is part 1 of a series. Part 2 will explain AutoML and neural architecture search, and Part 3 will look at Google's AutoML in particular. There are frequent media headlines about both the scarcity of machine learning talent (see here, here, and here) and about the promises of companies claiming their products automate machine learning and eliminate the need for ML expertise altogether (see here, here, and here). In his keynote at the TensorFlow DevSummit, Google's head of AI Jeff Dean estimated that there are tens of millions of organizations that have electronic data that could be used for machine learning but lack the necessary expertise and skills.

If the internet was the major change for humanity following the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the application of artificial intelligence is perhaps the next transformation. Last week's headline, "Robots could take a million local jobs by 2038", may sound incredible or even be seen as scaremongering. But human resources being replaced by artificial intelligence will be an inevitable trend we have to reckon with. It is perhaps time we put more thought into the implications and the corresponding actions needed to help cope with the challenge. If the study by the One Country, Two Systems Research Institute is any reference, more than a quarter of Hong Kong's workforce, including secretaries and accountants, is vulnerable to automation. Jobs that are considered safer include doctors, nurses, teachers, architects and journalists.

If the internet was the major change for humanity following the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the application of artificial intelligence is perhaps the next transformation. Last week's headline, "Robots could take a million local jobs by 2038", may sound incredible or even be seen as scaremongering. But human resources being replaced by artificial intelligence will be an inevitable trend we have to reckon with. It is perhaps time we put more thought into the implications and the corresponding actions needed to help cope with the challenge. If the study by the One Country, Two Systems Research Institute is any reference, more than a quarter of Hong Kong's workforce, including secretaries and accountants, is vulnerable to automation. Jobs that are considered safer include doctors, nurses, teachers, architects and journalists.

Recommendation systems are an integral part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and have become increasingly important in the growing age of commercialization in AI. Deep learning (DL) techniques for recommendation systems (RS) provide powerful latent-feature models for effective recommendation but suffer from the major drawback of being non-interpretable. In this paper we describe a framework for explainable temporal recommendations in a DL model. We consider an LSTM based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture for recommendation and a neighbourhood-based scheme for generating explanations in the model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on the Netflix dataset by jointly optimizing for both prediction accuracy and explainability.

Alexa has taken the world by storm as arguably the most comprehensive and full-featured digital assistant out there. Not only is it a great way to interact with your Amazon devices, but you can also find Alexa on a range of third-party devices – including some Sonos speakers, which many consider to be the best multi-room speakers on the market. If you're looking to set up Alexa to use on your Sonos speaker, there are a few things you should know. Like, for example, the fact that Alexa currently only works with the Sonos One and Sonos Beam speakers, though more are sure to come, and you can still use Alexa with other Sonos speakers. In any case, here's a step-by-step guide to set up Alexa for your Sonos One or Sonos Beam speaker.