For this year's report, I took a stab at learning all the CSS/JS that I've always wanted to know, and then went after the task of making a fully responsive report. I've succeeded in doing so, and so this PDF version isn't as good as the real thing. In the next few days I will be sharing a link to the real digital experience. But for now -- enjoy this static version of the report which has a few parts that couldn't render to static form. Because ... this year's report is truly computationally designed and therefore needs to be expressed appropriately (smile). Expect a video version on my new YouTube channel "John Maeda is Learning." What can I do about it? As the marginal return on computing power (a la Moore's law) diminishes and technology is less of a differentiating factor, the value of design has entered the foreground. Five (20%) of the top cumulative-funded VC- backed ventures that have raised additional capital since 2013 are noted to have designer co-founders.

Aseptika in St Ives and Zenzium in Cheshire have been awarded an unspecified grant from the UK's innovation agency to leverage AI and develop a new home-based early warning system for people with severe respiratory disease. Artificial Intelligence will automatically analyse and learn from data generated by the patient at home, using easy-to-use medical monitors and wearables, which connect to Aseptika's Activ8rlives App. The companies will introduce a Smart LungHealth system in the form of the Cloud-connecting Activ8rlives4 App and will also embed the AI alerting system into Aseptika's future wearable medical monitor called the BuddyWOTCH, currently in development. Aseptika and Zenzium will collaborate to create a system to automatically warn when patients health is declining. Looking at anonymised information gathered from previous clinical trials showed that many patients do not treat exacerbations and may not even be aware that they are having them.

In almost every industry today, you're seeing an increase in personalized experiences for consumers. With more people wanting control over how they buy or consume content, entertainment companies are in the midst of abiding by these customer demands. The consumer need to personalize content is a psychological impulse to find more control in a world filled with information overload. Since media content choices are often overwhelming, it's all the more important for consumers to find something fitting their world views. At the center of all this is artificial intelligence. Take a look at how machine learning continues to evolve personalized experiences in entertainment and media.

A Gaussian classifier or nearest mean classifier just uses the mean of each class to make classifications. It therefore assumes classes are spherical Gaussians. The softmax on a CNN by contrast is more like multinomial logistic regression, which learns linear boundaries like a nearest mean classifier, but not the same boundary. I want to force the CNN to learn features in the last layer such that it has a prototype (mean) for each category, and uses a nearest mean rule to make classifications.

News agency Reuters has launched Lynx Insight, an AI-powered tool designed to help its journalists create stories, in a move that could also have implications for content marketing. The tool can analyse data, suggest story ideas, and even write some sentences. It has been trialled by dozens of journalists since the summer, and will now be rolled out across Reuters newsrooms. Reuters said the aim was not to replace reporters but instead augment them with a digital data scientist and copywriting assistant. Reg Chua, executive editor of editorial operations, data and innovation at Reuters, said: "The real value is using machines to do what they're good at and then presenting that to humans -- that's the best of both worlds."

Embarking on a dangerous mission together in search of their missing fathers, Lara and Lu Ren forge a bond while surviving treacherous seas and sinister villains. "I think his father was always in and out of his life, so when he walked out he just thought he disappeared, had finally walked out… and good riddance. But people in denial really want to know the truth, and eventually that's what motivates him to go on this dangerous journey with Lara."

"Genuine Intelligence is the essential ingredient that guarantees a travel professional will never become obsolete by emerging artificial intelligence platforms. It puts the travel professional in the driver's seat of the bus instead of being run over by it," Ische adds.

Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Jeff Bezos attends The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 7, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. SAN FRANCISCO -- Nobody ever said original programming was cheap, but an internal Amazon document shows just how expensive it can be -- to the tune of $500 million for a new prequel series of "The Lord of the Rings." Amazon said in November it plans to create a multi-season prequel based on the beloved book series and blockbuster movies that came out of it. Insiders put the cost just for rights at $250 million. Now comes word from a leaked document obtained by Reuters that Amazon could spend another $250 million on production and marketing for the series, bringing the total cost to $500 million.

There's a performance tradeoff inherent in batch size selection--a larger batch size is often more efficient computationally (up to a point) but while that might increase the number of samples/s you process, it also can mean that the number of SGD iterations you take /s decreases. It currently seems that with deep networks it's preferable to take many small steps than to take fewer larger ones (again, this is a design tradeoff that requires experimentation to nail down optimally for any given dataset/net). There's an intense amount of research going on examining this phenomenon in theoretical and empirical detail, and evidence currently seems to be pointing towards the higher variance gradients of minibatch gradient descent actually being tied to generalization.

The late Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is one of history's least likely best-sellers. Yet the book was a pop-cultural phenomenon, selling more than 10 million copies and popularizing everything from advanced cosmological theories to the phrase "turtles all the way down." It was also adapted into a documentary of the same name by Errol Morris. A Brief History of Time (which is currently streamable on FilmStruck) was Morris' first major documentary after The Thin Blue Line and the first of his portrait films. Combining interviews with Hawking, his family, his friends, and his colleagues with clips from Disney's bizarre live-action sci-fi film The Black Hole, archival images, and, of course, a Philip Glass score, A Brief History of Time is the kind of film that only Morris could make. After Hawking's death on Wednesday, I called up Morris to talk about making the film, why Hawking was his generation's celebrity scientist, and their friendship, which continued for decades. Isaac Butler: What drew you to the book--or to Hawking--as a subject?