At the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, Kathryn Hume pointed me to Ellen Ullman's excellent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of …

In the past, Acoustic Scene Classification systems have been based on hand crafting audio features that are input to a classifier. Nowadays, the common trend is to adopt data driven techniques, e.g., deep learning, where audio representations are learned from data. In this paper, we propose a system that consists of a simple fusion of two methods of the aforementioned types: a deep learning approach where log-scaled mel-spectrograms are input to a convolutional neural network, and a feature engineering approach, where a collection of hand-crafted features is input to a gradient boosting machine. We first show that both methods provide complementary information to some extent. Then, we use a simple late fusion strategy to combine both methods. We report classification accuracy of each method individually and the combined system on the TUT Acoustic Scenes 2017 dataset. The proposed fused system outperforms each of the individual methods and attains a classification accuracy of 72.8% on the evaluation set, improving the baseline system by 11.8%.

A recent Refinery29 piece by lifestyle editor Cait Munro confirms what we seasoned homebodies have always known: Staying at home is cool. That declaration is based on a recent survey from market research firm Mintel that suggests almost three in 10 young millennials (people aged 24-31) prefer drinking at home because it takes too much effort to go out. And they're not alone--55 percent of Americans of all ages would prefer a night in with a glass of rosé over a bar crawl. The survey participants cited everything from wanting to drink in a relaxing environment to a desire to save money as the impetus behind their general aversion to bars and clubs, but the millennials Munro interviewed herself offered another rationale for the shift from the streets to the sheets: online dating. What Munro calls the Netflix-and-Chill factor can be accurately described by this quote from Jenifer Golden, "a self-proclaimed'older millennial' and one half of the duo behind the podcast It's Complicated" who says, "It's the whole dating idea of Netflix and like, I'm going to sit on my couch, watch all of the things that I could possibly watch and drink all my wine from Trader Joe's. Why would I leave my house? I can invite somebody over to hang out with me."

In the fall of 1962, The Jetsons debuted in primetime on ABC-TV as the network's first show to be broadcasted in color. It was the height of the Space Race, and Americans eagerly tuned in for a tantalizing view of the future. This particular future was Orbit City in the year 2062. The Jetsons were a nuclear family that lived, worked, and went to school in buildings high above the clouds. They commuted in flying cars, benefitted from abundant technology, and Rosie the robot did much of their housekeeping.

Alexa has a new job: hotel concierge. Amazon has launched a version of Alexa for hotels that lets guests order room service through the voice assistant, ask for more towels or get restaurant recommendations without having to pick up the phone and call the front desk. Marriott has signed up for the service, and will place Amazon Echo smart speakers in 10 hotels this summer, including its Westin and St. Regis brands. It is another way for Amazon to sell its voice assistant and devices to businesses and get Alexa in front of more customers. Amazon already sells a version of Alexa for workplaces, and has struck deals to place Alexa in cars and refrigerators.

Walking into my closet can sometimes feel like visiting Narnia. There are beautiful, whimsical friends in there, alongside a dizzying array of outdated pieces and random monstrosities from the early aughts. I'm someone who would benefit from Amazon's Echo Look, a standalone camera designed to snap photos of your outfits of the day and recommend clothes that suit your style. Aside from the chance to get reacquainted with my clothes, I also relished the excuse to take full-length selfies every day, all in the name of improving my already excellent taste. The Echo Look is a voice-enabled camera that's great for getting daily full-length photos and videos of your outfits. It also doubles as an Alexa speaker, which is nifty, although the audio quality is too poor to actually stream music.

Beauty, to borrow a cliché, is in the eye of the beholder. But what if your beholder's eyes could be hacked? In Reality, they can be. The short film--from Revenge writer-director Coralie Fargeat--imagines a future where people can buy an implant that allows them to live in an alternative reality where they can be seen as they want to be seen. Reality, which you can watch in full above, is set in Paris in the future.

Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are useful for a lot of things, like telling you what the weather's going to be or reminding you of an upcoming calendar appointment. But they can be entertaining too, providing the occasional fun fact or playing that hit song from Beyonce. Or, when you want a little levity in an otherwise crappy day, telling some really corny dad jokes. You've probably heard them before. Ask Siri, Alexa, Google or Cortana to tell you a joke, and you'll likely hear something like this: "I couldn't figure out why a baseball kept getting larger. "What do you call a talking dinosaur?