The Flintstones, a cartoon about life in the Stone Age, has just surpassed The Jetsons, a cartoon about life in the distant future, when it comes to technological innovation. Researchers have successfully trained artificial intelligence to generate new clips of the prehistoric animated series based on nothing but random text descriptions of what's happening in a scene. A team of researchers from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, trained an AI by feeding it over 25,000 three-second clips of the cartoon, which hasn't seen any new episodes in over 50 years. Most AI experiments as of late have involved generating freaky images based on what was learned, but this time the researchers included detailed descriptions and annotations of what appeared, and what was happening, in every clip the AI ingested. As a result, the new Flintstones animations generated by the Allen Institute's AI aren't just random collages of chopped up cartoons.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

A report from Bloomberg earlier this week claimed that Apple's HomePod isn't doing so well, and that the company cut orders for new hardware from suppliers. This might not shock some of you: Apple missed the all-important holiday buying season and is competing with less expensive hardware from Google, Sonos and Amazon. But is the first smart speaker with Siri already a failure, or does the HomePod simply need time to find its place? I'm not in any way surprised that the HomePod has fizzled, simply because it's a weird product with a very weird proposition. I seriously considered buying it in the run-up to its launch, but ultimately couldn't find a strong enough reason to plunk down $350.

The fundamental problem in short-text classification is \emph{feature sparseness} -- the lack of feature overlap between a trained model and a test instance to be classified. We propose \emph{ClassiNet} -- a network of classifiers trained for predicting missing features in a given instance, to overcome the feature sparseness problem. Using a set of unlabeled training instances, we first learn binary classifiers as feature predictors for predicting whether a particular feature occurs in a given instance. Next, each feature predictor is represented as a vertex $v_i$ in the ClassiNet where a one-to-one correspondence exists between feature predictors and vertices. The weight of the directed edge $e_{ij}$ connecting a vertex $v_i$ to a vertex $v_j$ represents the conditional probability that given $v_i$ exists in an instance, $v_j$ also exists in the same instance. We show that ClassiNets generalize word co-occurrence graphs by considering implicit co-occurrences between features. We extract numerous features from the trained ClassiNet to overcome feature sparseness. In particular, for a given instance $\vec{x}$, we find similar features from ClassiNet that did not appear in $\vec{x}$, and append those features in the representation of $\vec{x}$. Moreover, we propose a method based on graph propagation to find features that are indirectly related to a given short-text. We evaluate ClassiNets on several benchmark datasets for short-text classification. Our experimental results show that by using ClassiNet, we can statistically significantly improve the accuracy in short-text classification tasks, without having to use any external resources such as thesauri for finding related features.

Lately, the DJI Drone Photography Award, make creative use of a drone to explore new photographic possibilities. The drone work is awe-inspiring, letting us consider the world from an alternative perspective. The Sand Castles (Part II) by Markel Redondo focuses on highlighting the Spain's problem from a new perspective. "We live in a society with huge housing issues, where many cannot afford a place to live, yet Spain has more than three million empty homes," said Redondo. Hegen loves exploring the relationship between man and nature and uses aerial photography via drone to document landscapes that have been transformed by human intervention.

Police in China arrested a man attending a concert thanks to facial recognition technology in security cameras. A man wanted by police was nabbed at a pop star's concert thanks to facial recognition technology -- which picked the alleged crook out of a crowd of 60,000 people. Chinese police said the suspect – only identified as Mr. Ao – was attending a concert by pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang last weekend when he was spotted by CCTV cameras. "The suspect looked completely caught by surprise when we took him away," police officer Li Jin told state news agency Xinhua. "He didn't think police would be able to catch him from a crowd of 60,000 so quickly."

Do You Trust This Computer? is not a particularly subtle watch. The documentary, from filmmaker Chris Paine, is dedicated to the dangers of artificial intelligence, and while it didn't make a splash in theaters, it was promoted enthusiastically by Elon Musk, who tweeted about the film and paid for it be streamed for free in early April. It starts by bombarding viewers with quotations and whizzy graphics of phones and brains. "We have a networked intelligence that watches us, knows everything about us," says one. "The change is coming and nobody can stop it," says another. It feels more like a trailer for a bad sci-fi movie than a documentary on AI.

We're all about being disruptive,

Artificial intelligence will solve Facebook's most vexing problems, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg insists. He just can't say when, or how. Zuckerberg referred to AI technology more than 30 times during ten hours of questioning from congressional lawmakers Tuesday and Wednesday, saying that it would one day be smart, sophisticated and eagle-eyed enough to fight against a vast variety of platform-spoiling misbehavior, including fake news, hate speech, discriminatory ads and terrorist propaganda. Over the next five to 10 years, he said, artificial intelligence would prove a champion for the world's largest social network in resolving its most pressing crises on a global scale -- while also helping the company dodge pesky questions about censorship, fairness and human moderation. "We started off in my dorm room with not a lot of resources and not having the AI technology to be able to proactively identify a lot of this stuff," Zuckerberg told the lawmakers, referring to Facebook's famous origin story.