A man walks through the Watson Premier display to learn about IBM Watson at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 9, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / DAVID MCNEW (Photo credit should read DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images) As developments, standards and controversy around Artificial Intelligence (AI) explodes, compellin...

It's the speaker to beat in terms of audio but being locked in to Apple services is frustrating and its voice assistant is lacking Tue 13 Feb 2018 02.00 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 02.02 EST After much anticipation, and speculation that Apple has missed the boat and handed victory to Amazon's champion Echo, the HomePod smart speaker is finally here. But is it actually any good? And why exactly does it cost four times as much as an Echo? The HomePod is a voice-controlled speaker that listens out for its wakeword "Hey, Siri" and then starts streaming what you say to Apple to interpret your commands and play whatever it is you wish. The fabric-covered cylinder stands an iPhone X-and-a-bit tall (172mm) with a diameter of an iPhone X (142mm), weighing 2.5kg (14.4 times the iPhone X).

One week in his high school programming club, Robbie Barrat, a 17-year-old from rural West Virginia, was a part of a debate about the potential of artificial intelligence to outperform humans. By the next week, he'd built a program that could rap on its own. Using an open-source machine learning library called PyBrain, the first version of his code was able to rearrange existing rap lyrics into new sequences. But 6,000 Kanye West lines and a few days later, the program can now write bars all its own. While it's definitely not rapping quite as well as most bona-fide human rappers just yet, it can recite its bars (mostly) on-beat, incorporating pauses for rhythmic effect.

Gordon's focus will be to rapidly grow nDimensional, an Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data and IoT application development platform provider, into a global brand by working with the executive team, clients and partners to create significant recurring economic value for every client. Gordon is currently the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Katalyst, a strategic advisory firm, and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors for Zixi, a software platform that enables the media industry to broadcast quality live video over IP. Previously he served as President of C3 IoT. Gordon is a 5-time CEO and has founded, helped launch or transformed 8 companies, resulting in 2 IPO's with a combined market cap of over $11 billion, numerous entity sales totaling over $1 billion, 17 acquisitions and has served on 10 boards. "nDimensional is excited to have Gordon join the Board of Directors as our Chairman. He is deeply knowledgeable about the complex market for operationalizing AI and IoT software. He understands the strategies businesses must establish to be successful in this market. Gordon's experience in building and growing businesses will be an invaluable asset to nDimensional as we expand our market share."

Predicting unobserved entries of a partially observed matrix has found wide applicability in several areas, such as recommender systems, computational biology, and computer vision. Many scalable methods with rigorous theoretical guarantees have been developed for algorithms where the matrix is factored into low-rank components, and embeddings are learned for the row and column entities. While there has been recent research on incorporating explicit side information in the low-rank matrix factorization setting, often implicit information can be gleaned from the data, via higher-order interactions among entities. Such implicit information is especially useful in cases where the data is very sparse, as is often the case in real-world datasets. In this paper, we design a method to learn embeddings in the context of recommendation systems, using the observation that higher powers of a graph transition probability matrix encode the probability that a random walker will hit that node in a given number of steps. We develop a coordinate descent algorithm to solve the resulting optimization, that makes explicit computation of the higher order powers of the matrix redundant, preserving sparsity and making computations efficient. Experiments on several datasets show that our method, that can use higher order information, outperforms methods that only use explicitly available side information, those that use only second-order implicit information and in some cases, methods based on deep neural networks as well.

Almost a year ago, Blumhouse Productions -- the studio that followed the wild success of Paranormal Activity with hits like Insidious, Whiplash, Split and Get Out -- secured the film rights for the video game Five Nights At Freddy's. Today, the company announced who'd be helming the movie adaptation, and it's...Chris Columbus, best known for directing Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Mrs. Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films. Five Nights At Freddy's is a horror game franchise following nighttime employees trying to survive Chuck E. Cheese-style enterprises where animatronic robots run amok trying to murder the player. It's a weird fit for Columbus, who's most known for tame films about families and magic. True, Columbus has had a broad career in Hollywood beyond just kid-friendly films: He wrote Gremlins and The Goonies, directed Adventures in Babysitting and the film version of the Broadway hit Rent, and produced The Help and The Witch.

A deluge of rain during the 2017 harvest slashed profits overnight – wheat for milling and barley for malting were downgraded and producers incurred additional costs for drying. Few industries have so much at stake than agriculture, and so much to gain from accurate, timely information. Advances in machine learning to simplify complexity and improve decision making is to be discussed at Agri-Tech East's Pollinator event on February 20 at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge. The event will include industry speakers from After the flood, Fujitsu, Iteris, Kings College London, Microsoft and PA Consulting describing the progress in applied artificial intelligence and looking to where the future is taking us. Speaker John Lord from Iteris explains that combining crop and environmental data with artificial intelligence (AI) can help farmers make key decisions.

"Soon, our habitat will be invaded by unreal humans. Not only they'll influence our way of living, but also intervene in our modus operandi." I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Last week I released a list of must watch movies on Machine Learning and Data Science. I've watched 8 of them till now.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Valentine's Day is only two days away. You could go off and overspend on getting a last-minute flower delivery, or you could get your significant other a gift that's guaranteed to show up on time and doesn't come with added delivery fees. Everyone knows Amazon offers free 2-day shipping on virtually everything for Prime members, but they're not the only retailer that can get your gift to your loved one on time.

A man walks through the Watson Premier display to learn about IBM Watson at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 9, 2018. As developments, standards and controversy around Artificial Intelligence (AI) explodes, compelling new groups are emerging that will drive expansion and implementation of AI at a new pace and depth. However, one such exclusive, burgeoning collective entitled #AIShowbiz Executive Roundtable is making particular moves. This Roundtable is one of the first business communities in the country solely dedicated to the intersection of AI and the entertainment industry, and it has powerful plans for 2018. In fact, the #AIShowbiz Executive Roundtable is an ancillary property of the larger #AIShowbiz Summit which actually just completed its second-year of panels and keynotes with various influencers in AI from around the world during a day-long conference in Los Angeles, California.