Sure, the formerly-cutting-edge virtual assistant has become the butt of many a tech joke, but Apple's Siri problem is only getting bigger. As Amazon and Google develop artificial-intelligence assistants that can do tasks small (set multiple cooking timers) and large (hold conversations with you and others), Siri has been stuck saying, "Here's what I found on the Web for that." At Apple's biggest software event of the year Monday, just four months after HomePod's release, the speaker was mentioned only once. Apple does have some new ideas about what Siri should do for us when iOS 12 launches for iPhones and iPads in the fall: We'll be able to program strings of tasks. A single custom phrase will, say, shut off the lights, turn down the thermostat and launch a podcast. But it feels like the ultimate marketing fake out.

Sony has unveiled the RX100 VI 20.1-megapixel premium compact camera with a new telephoto lens that will make it a lot more interesting for travel photography. T lens of the last model, the Mark VI packs a hugely longer, optically stabilized 24-200 f/2.8-4.5 T mm 8.3X zoom lens. T lens, but the extra range will be worth it for many folks, and Sony has boosted other specs to make up for it. The RX100 VI is equipped with a 1.0-type Exmor RS CMOS sensor with a built in DRAM chip to maximize speed. It can can shoot at 24 fps with full AF/AE tracking as before, but now focuses in just 0.03 seconds compared to 0.05 seconds. Moreover, eye-tracking Eye AF focus is twice as fast as on the RX100 V.

Even though I just skimmed it so far, I think this is a great paper! I think the structure of this framework seems very clean and reasonable. However, I wonder what benefits there are in using this over probabilistic programs. As far as I can tell programs have far greater expressive power, but I can see that it's easier for a computer to reason about a graph than a program, and therefore optimize it further.

Here is the June 2018 issue of Computer Vision News, the magazine of the algorithm community published by RSIP Vision: 46 pages worth reading about Computer Vision, Image Processing, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Would you set the dropout probability for every layer to the same value? I've seen this in some papers and I assume it is because this mininizes the hyperparameters which need to be optimized. What do you think about this?

The 18th-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley concluded that, since all we know of the universe is what our senses convey to us, things in the world exist only to the extent that we perceive them. They have no material reality, but are phenomena in and of our minds, or the mind of God. Samuel Johnson famously countered this philosophy by kicking a large stone and saying, "I refute it thus!" Two hundred years later, while American campuses roiled with protests against the Vietnam War, the philosopher, historian, and physicist Thomas Kuhn met with a grad student at Princeton's legendary Institute for Advanced Study to discuss the student's paper. The professor and student disagreed on some fundamental ideas, and the conversation grew heated.

Several actors of different ages, ethnicities, genders, sizes and shapes auditioned for the role of Janet on NBC's "The Good Place." But when D'Arcy Carden showed up to try out for the role, series creator Michael Schur knew right away that he'd already found his Janet. "She made the robotic language that I had written for the dummy scene seemed like a real person was doing it," Schur told Vanity Fair of why he picked Carden to play the sentient database. "She found this weird humanity inside this robotic scene." Carden told Vulture last October that her "The Good Place" audition was unlike any audition she had done before.

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a psychopathic AI using images pulled from Reddit. Oh, and they've named it Norman after Alfred Hitchcock's Norman Bates. This is how our very own Terminator starts... The purpose of the experiment was to test how data fed into an algorithm affects its "outlook". Specifically, how training an algorithm on some of the darkest elements of the web – in this case, images of people dying grisly deaths sourced from an unnamed Reddit subgroup – affects the software.

Asus just showed the world Project Precog at Computex 2018, and I'm drooling all over my keyboard. Imagine a slim laptop with dual touchscreens, one of which can transform into an adaptive keyboard and trackpad combo that can dynamically change the position of keys based on where your fingers are. Imagine a laptop that learns your work routines and can conserve battery life to anticipate an upcoming video conference. Asus' Project PreCog in Stand Mode Asus is also making waves at Computex with their recently announced ROG Phone. Project Precog (likely named after the precognitives from the film Minority Report) will ship with Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa built in, and can function in 4 different configurations: stand mode, book mode, tent mode and flat mode.

Samantha, a sex robot stands, in the home of robotics expert Dr Sergi Santos and his partner of 16 years, Maritsa Kissamitaki. The couple deisgned the artificial intelligence-driven robot that they say is capable of enjoying sex. Want to have sex with no strings attached? How about sex with wires attached (or at least wires involved)? Sex robots (or so-called sexbots) are not just coming, they are already here.