The concept of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically machine learning, being used for less-than-worthy causes has come to public attention this past week via viral videos of Nicolas Cage in movie clips. What is so interesting about Nicolas Cage movie clips, I hear you ask. Well, Cage is the star of movies he never made. You can find clips of him as Indiana Jones, James Bond and, um, Lois Lane. Finally, Face/Off makes so much sense.

The Cloverfield Paradox isn't the only sci-fi movie Netflix has saved from Hollywood purgatory. Variety has discovered that Netflix bought the worldwide rights to Extinction, a sci-fi thriller from Universal starring Lizzy Caplan and Michael Pena. The studio was originally slated to have released the alien invasion flick on January 26th, but took it off its release schedule just two months prior -- not exactly a resounding vote of confidence. The title is expected to premiere on Netflix sometime later in 2018. The movie stars Caplan and Pena as a couple, with Pena plagued by recurring nightmares of losing his family.

Amazon announced today that Amazon Music listeners will now be able to ask Alexa to make a playlist through their Alexa-enabled devices. Commands like "Alexa, add this to my playlist" and "Alexa, create a new playlist" can be used and users can ask the assistant to add songs to a specific playlist or to create a new playlist from the current song being listened to. Last month, Amazon added support for SMS messaging through Alexa-enabled devices as well as voice control to its Alexa app for Android. It introduced Alexa support to its Amazon Music app for iOS and Android last September and the company says that playlist creation has been one of its most-requested voice features. Prime Music listeners and Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can use the few feature as can those with the Amazon Music Unlimited Echo Plan, which makes the premium streaming service available on a single Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show or Amazon Tap.

Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement. Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio, extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message, its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Photoshopping celebrities' faces onto nude photos has been around for years. Now, new technology has spawned a more sinister upgrade to that practice--and it has online communities scrambling to keep nonconsensual adult content off their platforms. This week, Reddit, Twitter, and Pornhub became the latest social platforms to ban deepfakes--fake porn videos in which artificial intelligence superimposes celebrities' (and other people's) faces onto the bodies of adult film actors. With free and easy-to-use facial recognition technology, users can create videos that are nearly indecipherable from reality.

When Snap first started selling its video-recording glasses, the hype was real. The company had only focused on software before that, and was dipping its toe into hardware with a relatively simple product. Add to that the device's limited availability via sporadic pop-up stores, and Spectacles fever spread rapidly. But hype alone cannot sustain a business. A year and a half later, with 150,000 Spectacles sold and hundreds of thousands reportedly languishing in warehouses, the furor has officially died out, apparently along with Snap's hardware ambitions.

I've been refreshing my CS basics with CTCI and LeetCode, but I don't know how much time I should spend on that versus reading papers and refreshing machine learning knowledge. Should I be able to do backpropagation with ease on a whiteboard? Ideally, I'd like to get involved in research and go back to school eventually.

Some firms in China now use artificial intelligence–powered facial recognition programs to confirm identities. BEIJING--In a gleaming high-rise here in northern Beijing's Haidian district, two hardware jocks in their 20s are testing new computer chips that might someday make smartphones, robots, and autonomous vehicles truly intelligent. The onlooker, Chen Yunji, a 34-year-old computer scientist and founding technical adviser of Cambricon Technologies here, explains that traditional processors, designed decades before the recent tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) research, "are slow and energy inefficient" at processing the reams of data required for AI. "Even if you have a very good algorithm or application," he says, its usefulness in everyday life is limited if you can't run it on your phone, car, or appliance. "Our goal is to change all lives."

Our identities, whether we are aware of them or not, seem to be in a period of transition. Thus, we could say that we find ourselves between this intermediate step that the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has already referred to as "liquid currency", and what Eli Pariser described in his book The Filter Bubble. The "filter bubble" concept refers to how the Internet, and for that matter, how the algorithms behind it are in charge of deciding what you read, think, and even buy. The Internet seems to provide us with an identity; however, who provides an identity to the conglomerate of algorithms that make up the network of networks? To understand how algorithms work, it is useful to know what they are, and to view the Internet as something more than a completely harmless or totally evil tool.

Writer-director Sadrac González puts an austere, arty spin on a solid science-fiction premise in "Black Hollow Cage," a time-travel movie more in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky than "Back to the Future." The film looks stunning and presents some provocative ideas, but González's quietly contemplative approach is numbing.