Automatic music recommendation has become an increasingly relevant problem in recent years, since a lot of music is now sold and consumed digitally. Most recommender systems rely on collaborative filtering. However, this approach suffers from the cold start problem: it fails when no usage data is available, so it is not effective for recommending new and unpopular songs. In this paper, we propose to use a latent factor model for recommendation, and predict the latent factors from music audio when they cannot be obtained from usage data. We compare a traditional approach using a bag-of-words representation of the audio signals with deep convolutional neural networks, and evaluate the predictions quantitatively and qualitatively on the Million Song Dataset.

Have you heard about the famous Jam Experiment? In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper from Columbia and Stanford University presented a study based on their field experiment. On a regular day, consumers shopping at an upscale grocery store at a local food market were presented with a tasting booth which displayed 24 varieties of Jam. On some other day, the same booth displayed only 6 varieties of Jam. The experiment was being conducted to adjudge which booth would garner more sales and it was assumed that more varieties of jam would fetch more people to the counter thereby getting more business.

How do we define "Intelligence"? One definition is to say intelligence is the ability to think in abstract terms. This is what separates us from animals. Polar bears, walruses, otters and other mammals have a marvellous ability to survive in their habitat. However, "intelligent" isn't a word that leaps to mind when we describe them. It is humans who have the ability to think in abstract terms -- to use metaphors, to devise calculus, to convert music to notes, to associate colour with emotions, to use logic, to think about thinking, to moralise, to contemplate eternity, and so on.

So says the famed quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest, alleging that we can look to what has already happened as an indication of what will happen next. This idea could be interpreted as being rather bleak; are we doomed to repeat the errors of the past until we correct them? We certainly do need to learn and re-learn life lessons--whether in our work, relationships, finances, health, or other areas--in order to grow as people. Zooming out, the same phenomenon exists on a much bigger scale--that of our collective human history. We like to think we're improving as a species, but haven't yet come close to doing away with the conflicts and injustices that plagued our ancestors.

This paper introduces stochastic recurrent neural networks which glue a deterministic recurrent neural network and a state space model together to form a stochastic and sequential neural generative model. The clear separation of deterministic and stochastic layers allows a structured variational inference network to track the factorization of the model's posterior distribution. By retaining both the nonlinear recursive structure of a recurrent neural network and averaging over the uncertainty in a latent path, like a state space model, we improve the state of the art results on the Blizzard and TIMIT speech modeling data sets by a large margin, while achieving comparable performances to competing methods on polyphonic music modeling. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

The accurate exposure is the key of capturing high-quality photos in computational photography, especially for mobile phones that are limited by sizes of camera modules. Inspired by luminosity masks usually applied by professional photographers, in this paper, we develop a novel algorithm for learning local exposures with deep reinforcement adversarial learning. To be specific, we segment an image into sub-images that can reflect variations of dynamic range exposures according to raw low-level features. Based on these sub-images, a local exposure for each sub-image is automatically learned by virtue of policy network sequentially while the reward of learning is globally designed for striking a balance of overall exposures. The aesthetic evaluation function is approximated by discriminator in generative adversarial networks.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Machine learning, the subset of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to perform tasks through examples and experience, is a hot area of research and development. Many of the applications we use daily use machine learning algorithms, including AI assistants, web search and machine translation. Your social media news feed is powered by a machine learning algorithm. The recommended videos you see on YouTube and Netflix are the result of a machine learning model.

In many machine learning applications, submodular functions have been used as a model for evaluating the utility or payoff of a set such as news items to recommend, sensors to deploy in a terrain, nodes to influence in a social network, to name a few. At the heart of all these applications is the assumption that the underlying utility/payoff function is known a priori, hence maximizing it is in principle possible. In real life situations, however, the utility function is not fully known in advance and can only be estimated via interactions. For instance, whether a user likes a movie or not can be reliably evaluated only after it was shown to her. Or, the range of influence of a user in a social network can be estimated only after she is selected to advertise the product.

When people hear the terms artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT), most think of a futuristic world often depicted in the movies. However, many of those predictions are now coming to fruition in this fourth industrial revolution that is currently transforming the way the world works in every way imaginable. Even though the full capability of AI and the IoT are still in their relative infancy, these two technologies are now being combined across every industry in scenarios where information and problem-solving can improve outcomes for all stakeholders. The last great convergence of this magnitude occurred in the late 1990s as mobile phones and the internet were on a collision course that has changed the course of human history. Most people now hold more computing power in the palm of their hand than was required to put a man on the moon in 1969.

All of them credit the competition for putting them on the map as an auctioneer.