The roles Gina Rodriguez played in "Jane the Virgin" and "Annihilation" could not be more different. In the former, Rodriguez plays a sweet and idealistic Jane Gloriana Villanueva who has strong morals and close family ties. In the latter, she plays the foul-mouthed lesbian paramedic named Anya Thorensen who has so many complex layers. Speaking to USA Today about the two roles, Rodriguez said that it felt great to be working on something so different. While she loves Jane, she cannot help but feel excited being on Anya's shoes.

The technology of AI in the present times is witnessing'deep learning'. The futuristic applications such as self-driving cars rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing.

Even newspaper publishers and media companies look forward to bringing AI into their arsenal. Popular media website Buzzfeed has incorporated AI in developing richer content. In mid 2016, US media company Tronc announced in an interview that they would bring more than 2,000 videos per day using AI. The digital era of publishing has certainly helped bridge the gap between consumers and the companies. Techniques such as prediction algorithms will help media giants to capture more viewership.

When I started looking at frameworks the main ones were Torch, Caffe and Theano. I ruled out Caffe for lack of flexibility and found Torch had the right level of abstraction for me (e.g. Switched to PyTorch not because of Python (was happy enough with Lua) but primarily because it made dynamic stuff (e.g. In general I like how quickly I can whip up even complex architectures in PyTorch, and no need to wait for compilation. I've seen it in use at Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter (so there are big companies using it, with more listed at the bottom of the website).

A subsidiary of British banking giant Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is running a pilot program using an artificial intelligence (AI) powered "digital human" to help customers with basic banking questions. The lifelike, virtual bank teller named "Cora" can answer up to 200 banking queries for NatWest customers in two-way conversations on a computer screen, tablet or mobile phone. The bank has been using Cora since 2017 and she's had about 100,000 conversations a month, the bank said on Wednesday. "Cora, the digital human is able to answer basic verbal questions like'How do I login to online banking?' 'How do I apply for a mortgage?' and'What do I do if I lose my card?'" said NatWest in a news release. Cora's human-like appearance includes ear piercings and facial expressions.

An image of a dog created by a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (GAN) algorithm. Back in 1999, Hany Farid was finishing his postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was in a library when he stumbled on a book called The Federal Rules of Evidence. The book caught his eye, and Farid opened to a random page, on which was a section entitled "Introducing Photos into a Court of Law as Evidence." Since he was interested in photography, Farid wondered what those rules were. While Farid was not surprised to learn that a 35mm negative is considered admissible as evidence, he was surprised when he read that then-new digital media would be treated the same way.

The healthcare industry is in the middle of a revolution, social media is getting smarter, and the era of drone-wielding super villains is right around the corner. Earlier this week seven of the world's most prominent organizations in the field of futurism published a report predicting the dangers posed by AI. The document is called "The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation." You can read the full version here. The only thing that could make it scarier is if Samuel L. Jackson were holding you at gunpoint and screaming it at you.

Computer Science and Engineering Professor Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University has taken a serious look at the robots of Star Wars fame and judges how realistic they are in a recent Science Robotics Focus piece--in it, she suggests some aspects of the robots are more realistic than others. Murphy focuses on CP30, the gold, humanoid robot with a British accent, his partner, R2D2 and the cute robot BB-8. Notably, only one of the three is able to talk, and has appendages that resemble human arms and legs. She discusses the possibility of developing such robots and how well they might work. She also compares them to a real-life space robot--NASA's Robonaut, a humanoid robot with arms and end effectors, but no legs.

Hello everyone, I'm currently studying some RL approaches from the well-known book(draft) of Sutton & Barto and have some problems in understanding approaches that solve continuing tasks (/non episodic task). Common algorithms like Q-Learning, Sarsa and Monte Carlo Control seem to require at leat one terminal-state to learn an optimal policy. The question that comes in my mind is, whether those algorithms can also be used for a continuing tasks, which?don't have a final state?.

My wife and I were just settling into bed one night when Alexa, the other woman in my life, decided to make herself heard. Without being summoned, the Amazon Echo Dot at my bedside -- one of the half-dozen devices that Alexa inhabits in our house -- lit up its spectral blue ring, as if it had heard its triggering wake word, "Alexa." But instead of offering help with some household chore, the voice assistant began to wail, like a child screaming in a horror-movie dream. "Huh," I said to my wife when it was over. She said something less kind. But here's what's really strange: By the next morning, we had forgotten all about it.