The purpose of a consumer drone remains nebulous these days. Depending on who you ask, you'll get a different answer. Drones are great for sophisticated aerial photography and video, but they're also adept at surveying empty lots of land and crowded real estate, or measuring agricultural yield and helping climate model the Arctic. Even as drones get more sophisticated, cheaper, and smaller, there isn't an easy answer beyond the fact that unmanned aerial vehicles are cool gadgets and fun to fly -- granted, where and when the Federal Aviation Administration deems it legal to do so. But what if a drone was smart enough to handle itself, in any and all situations? What if the drone didn't need to be flown at all, because software did it for you?

"Fake news" has become a buzzword, thanks to social media. This becomes even more worrisome in light of the recent scandal about Facebook's shady data-sharing and advertising practices. But we haven't seen anything yet. Because of the latest technological breakthroughs in AI, reality itself--or our perception of it--could be at stake. With tools that are available right now, AI-driven "fake" videos are ready for primetime.

Artificial intelligence can influence your travel plans, anticipate your online orders and improve efficiency around the house. In the entertainment sphere, there's an AI technology to make you feel more while watching a movie. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab were able to train a machine to manipulate the emotional responses of video viewers. Their findings were published in collaboration with strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The MIT team examined the neural perceptions of thousands of people who watched movies, videos, online features and television programs in sections. They paired their reactions to a neural network, which guessed which parts of each clip would spark the greatest emotional response in humans.

'Do You Trust This Computer?'

Binge-watching TV shows on streaming services is becoming increasingly popular. However, there is a paucity of comprehensive metrics to effectively summarize such media watching behavior. We address this gap by presenting two new metrics—Bingeability and Ad Tolerance—to quantify key aspects of watching streaming TV interspersed with ads. These metrics are motivated by consumer psychology literature on hedonic adaptation and also reflect media consumption behavior. Using machine learning methods, including ensembles of classification trees, we identify the key predictors of these metrics, study non-linear effects, and rank the predictors in order of predictive power. The superiority and validity of these metrics is also discussed.

While there have been significant advances in detecting emotions from speech and image recognition, emotion detection on text is still under-explored and remained as an active research field. This paper introduces a corpus for text-based emotion detection on multiparty dialogue as well as deep neural models that outperform the existing approaches for document classification. We first present a new corpus that provides annotation of seven emotions on consecutive utterances in dialogues extracted from the show, Friends. We then suggest four types of sequence-based convolutional neural network models with attention that leverage the sequence information encapsulated in dialogue. Our best model shows the accuracies of 37.9% and 54% for fine- and coarse-grained emotions, respectively. Given the difficulty of this task, this is promising.

Netflix has released hundreds of Originals and plans to spend $8 billion over the next year on content. Creators of these stories pour their hearts and souls into turning ideas into joy for our viewers. The sublime art of doing this well is hard to describe, but it necessitates a careful orchestration of creative, business and technical decisions. Here we will focus on the latter two -- business & technical decisions like planning budgets, finding locations, building sets, and scheduling guest actors that enable the creative act of connecting with viewers. Each production is a mountain of operational and logistical challenges that consumes and produces tremendous amounts of data.

SEATTLE, April 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Applexus Technologies, a full-service business and technology solutions company based in the Seattle area, announced the launch of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice to provide AI software and services to clients. The newly launched team is part of Applexus Product and Innovation. The new practice supports a wide variety of AI services and solutions, through custom and packaged solutions, using emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and big data analysis. The Applexus Chief Technologist and AI practice leader is Dr. Thomas Koickal, one of the longest-serving global practitioners of machine learning based technologies. His career of more than 20 years has included work at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, a research center of the Indian Space Research Organization.

This article originally appeared in Vulture. When the first trailer arrived for Isle of Dogs last fall, I had three immediate, consecutive reactions: One: Oh, no. Two: Wait, I take that back. I'm going to be a good critic and reserve judgement until the week of March 23. In the week since Isle of Dogs' initial limited release, a measured, varied, and nuanced discussion about Wes Anderson's use of Japanese culture--and other cultures in general--has happened in fits and starts.

The artificial intelligence boom has expanded into creative fields once deemed uniquely human, like music, poetry, and even narrative podcasts. AI has also started writing rudimentary news articles and assisting reporters, but a new startup launched Wednesday says it will use AI to publish breaking news about a wide variety of topics. The site is called "Knowhere," and its creators say that they believe AI can be used to write unbiased news. The site will publish three versions of every article, aggregated from right-, left-, and center-leaning websites. "Fake news, the Russia misinformation scandal, and all of these issues that are at the top of the Zeitgeist at the moment are all symptoms of a fundamental problem that information moves too fast and at too large a scale for us to be able to reliably parse it and understand the world as human beings," Knowhere editor-in-chief and cofounder Nathaniel Barling and told me on the phone.