We can't be sure about what Spotify is actually trying to build in Stockholm, but its search for employees are in line with what you'd expect from a company trying to make a smart speaker. Last April, Spotify was looking for people with expertise in voice recognition and natural language processing. And more recently Spotify sought out someone with "graduate-level expertise" in natural language understanding to join its team in Boston and "multiple years of industrial experience in building conversational agents via speech or text (e.g., chatbots)." This focus on a spoken interface could apply to future, voice-controlled versions of the Spotify app, but it's not much of a stretch to think Spotify could be trying to build a Google Home or Sonos rival. Let's say for the sake of argument that's what's going on.

Used across a wide range of processes to improve or replace human input, machine learning is attractive because it is able to addresses problems never before tackled due to the prohibitively large volumes of data involved. But when it comes to managing these often massive data sets, it's important to think big from the start to ensure long term success.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) venture from tech giant Alibaba could ease a portion of the various issues confronting Chinese farmers in the pork business. China is the world's biggest maker and consumer of pork, and monitoring the country's estimated 700 million creatures is famously troublesome for farmers. They have to give careful consideration to guarantee that piglets aren't squashed to death by their moms, sows aren't reared past their prime, and sick pigs don't pass their diseases on to the remaining populace. Right now, agriculturists track pigs by clipping wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) labels to the creatures' ears. These can be costly, and farmers don't generally have room schedule-wise to fit each pig with a tag and scan them.

"At the time, it felt like we were in a car careening out of control and it wasn't just that everyone was saying, 'we'll be fine' -- it's that they didn't even see the car," he said. Ovadya saw early what many -- including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs -- wouldn't grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable -- to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments -- so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. But it's what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you. "Alarmism can be good -- you should be alarmist about this stuff," Ovadya said one January afternoon before calmly outlining a deeply unsettling projection about the next two decades of fake news, artificial intelligence–assisted misinformation campaigns, and propaganda. "We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine," he said.

Not (yet!) of a sentient digital entity that could turn rogue and cause the end of mankind, but the exploitation of artificial intelligence and machine learning for nefarious goals. According to a group of 26 experts from various universities, civil society organizations, and think-tanks, the threat landscape can undergo dramatic changes in the next five to ten years. "The costs of attacks may be lowered by the scalable use of AI systems to complete tasks that would ordinarily require human labor, intelligence, and expertise. A natural effect would be to expand the set of actors who can carry out particular attacks, the rate at which they can carry out these attacks, and the set of potential targets," they noted in a recently released report. "New attacks may arise through the use of AI systems to complete tasks that would be otherwise impractical for humans. In addition, malicious actors may exploit the vulnerabilities of AI systems deployed by defenders."

The film, part of the classic science fiction franchise, follows the crew of the USS Enterprise as they attempt to stop the genetically engineered despot Khan Noonien Singh from acquiring a powerful planet-shaping device and exacting revenge. The event will be followed by a discussion between King, and Jacob Brogan, Slate writer and host of the podcast Working. Audience members will also have a chance to ask King their own questions about the film and his career. This latest installment of Future Tense's "My Favorite Movie" series will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 6, at Washington, D.C.'s Landmark E Street Cinema at 555 11th Street NW. The event is free and open to the public.

Media Distillery will monitor all Austrian radio and television channels in real-time. In order to facilitate this big step, Media Distillery created and implemented new Austrian speech recognition software. We are looking forward to a fruitful partnership with APA-DeFacto and hope to successfully help Austrian clients keep track of their radio and television coverage.

Artificial intelligence built into new high-tech traffic signals could be a solution to Edmonton's LRT-related congestion issues, argues a west-end councillor. Andrew Knack is looking for council support for a new study and series of pilot projects, hoping to learn from cities such as Pittsburgh. Smart traffic signals there reduced travel time by 25 per cent and idling time by over 40 per cent, according to Rapid Flow Technologies, the company responsible. The company believes its system -- a network of 50 intersections -- also reduces vehicles emissions by 21 per cent because it cuts down on idling. "It's not because vehicles are moving faster, but they're stopping less," said Steve Smith, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics and Rapid Flow CEO.

One of the problems in demystifying artificial intelligence is that once an AI-based product reaches the public, "we stop calling it AI," said Tara Chklovski, the CEO and founder of Iridescent, a nonprofit that aims to educate and empower children and their parents on engineering and …

This is how the robot revolution starts. Boston Dynamics' robots won't be held back by puny humans Are you looking for the exact moment robots decide to turn on their human creators? You might want to mark this day on your calendar. Boston Dynamics has posted video of a SpotMini test where it gauged the bot's ability to adjust to interference -- in this case, from a pesky human. It needs hardware.Spotify might be building a smart speaker of its own Spotify might be working a smart speaker, according to new job listings.