Media
'Terminator: Dark Fate' Didn't Need an Exploding Airplane
The latest Terminator movie, Dark Fate, struggles to give satisfying emotional arcs to its large cast of characters. Writer Sara Lynn Michener says it doesn't help that a large chunk of the movie is wasted on a bombastic action sequence set aboard an exploding cargo plane. "I think there's this idea with, especially, male directors where they get really excited about trying to top what's been done before, but do it even bigger and better and more Michael Bay-ish," Michener says in Episode 386 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Are we really doing that in 2019? Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that the cargo plane sequence was silly, and stands in sharp contrast to the sense of realism captured in the franchise's best installments, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
AI is all around us Accenture UK
Here's a challenge I like throwing out: Just sit down for five minutes and think about how much "smart" technology you use in a typical day. It could be the way that audio book you listen to on your way to work syncs up so your text e-reader picks up at the exact same spot when you sink into your favourite chapter at night. Maybe it's how your car knows when you're approaching and turns the heater on to warm it for you. Or maybe it's how when you get into an Uber, the Spotify playlist you were listening to is coming through the speakers. Or how instead of typing in a password or pin, your mobile banking app knows it's you because it recognised your face.
Panel Discussion: Is fooling an AI really that easy? - DataHack Summit 2019
A self-driving car approaches a stop sign, but instead of slowing down, it accelerates into the busy intersection. An accident report later reveals that four small rectangles had been stuck to the face of the sign. These fooled the car's onboard artificial intelligence (AI) into misreading the word'stop' as'speed limit 45'. There are instances of deceiving facial recognition systems by sticking a printed pattern on glasses or hats and tricking speech recognition systems using white noise. AI is part of daily life, running everything from automated telephone systems to user recommendations on the streaming service Netflix.
Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. 'Superman' movie on quartz glass
Microsoft and Warner Bros. have collaborated to successfully store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic "Superman" movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster, 75 by 75 by 2 millimeters thick. It was the first proof of concept test for Project Silica, a Microsoft Research project that uses recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to store data in quartz glass. Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass. The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong. It represents an investment by Microsoft Azure to develop storage technologies built specifically for cloud computing patterns, rather than relying on storage media designed to work in computers or other scenarios.
Thomson Reuters and Crowe Showcase Strategic Collaboration at SYNERGY
Thomson Reuters and Crowe LLP are showcasing an innovative collaboration to help tax professionals address the burdensome manual work related to Schedule K-1 forms at the 2019 SYNERGY users' conference. The significant increase in the number of alternative investments over the past decade has led to a growing number of K-1s. More than 40 million K-1 forms are produced annually, each one requiring manual data capture and aggregation into partner tax returns, resulting in countless hours of complex manual work for tax professionals. The K1 Analyzer tool uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to read, extract and analyze K-1 data from front to back, including statements and disclosures. This process virtually eliminates the manual data-entry work associated with K-1s and enables recipients to aggregate their stack of K-1s in minutes, rather than days.