Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that's something of an artist – a "drawing bot." The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object, but it also adds details to those images that weren't included the text, indicating that the A.I. has a little imagination of its own, says Microsoft. "If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch," explained Xiaodong He, a principal researcher and research manager in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington, in Microsoft's announcement. "These birds may not exist in the real world -- they are just an aspect of our computer's imagination of birds."

Samsung Electronics has revealed that its Internet of Things or IoT platform now has facial recognition technology. Does this mean the South Korea tech giant could be incorporating a Face ID-like feature to its upcoming Galaxy S9 flagship? On Thursday, South Korean online news outlet Etnews learned that Samsung's IoT platform, called "ARTIK," has absorbed a technology that will allow its to recognize faces based on machine learning. This means Samsung products that support its IoT platform could also be capable of recognizing users through facial recognition. Samsung has also said that the machine learning of ARTIK can recognize faces with the help of Microsoft's "MS-Celeb-1M," a large scale real world face image dataset that already contains images of 1 million people.

I recently saw the latest Star Wars movie "The Last Jedi." It was powerful in many ways, not the least of which was because it was the final film for actress Carrie Fisher, who was excellent. In film, the way to connect with the theater goer is with close-ups of the faces of the actors. It's powerful and we respond, as human beings, to another person's face. When radio was born, people could not see faces, and the connection radio listeners would make would be with people's voices.

Software with machine learning and AI can forge deceptively realistic TV appearances by politicians. Researchers are sounding the alarm and calling for certificates of authenticity for pictures and videos.

The simplest way to eliminate the spread of fake news would be to limit ourselves to a small group of mainstream publishers who do all their own reporting and fact-checking. The counterargument, of course, is that an open and democratic society allows for a wide range of voices, not just the ones a small cabal of editors deem acceptable. Fake news promises to destroy this system and undermine trust and democracy, which is why addressing fake news has become one of the tech industry's most significant and important challenges. His initial focus, post-9/11, was on national security, which is how he first become intrigued by the advantages AI offers in analyzing complex data sets. As 2017's fake news scandals grew, DeAngelis was approached by leading media industry veteran Greg D'Alba, CEO of VIDL News, to apply the same type of analysis Enterra was using to control the complex value chains of Fortune 500 companies to the media industry, where D'Alba saw a growing need to verify and validate news stories.

The impact of machine learning applications – from machine vision to voice recognition – will be massively enhanced via the deployment of 800,000 machine learning centric chips in data centres this year – roughly quadruple the volume in 2016. And one billion smartphone users will create augmented reality (AR) content in 2018 globally, with half of UK smartphone users doing so. The findings stand out in Deloitte UK's TMT Predictions 2018 report, from its technology-focused practice, published today. A surge in deployment of FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) - will be a core driver in the use of machine learning. FPGAs and ASICs will represent between a quarter and a third of all machine learning chips deployed this year.

HONG KONG: David Hanson envisions a future in which AI-powered robots evolve to become super-intelligent genius machines'' that might help solve some of mankind's most challenging problems. If only it were as simple as that. The Texas-born former sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering and his Hong Kong-based startup Hanson Robotics are combining artificial intelligence with southern China's expertise in toy design, electronics and manufacturing to craft humanoid social robots'' with faces designed to be lifelike and appealing enough to win trust from humans who interact with them. Hanson, 49, is perhaps best known as the creator of Sophia, a talk show-going robot partly modeled on Audrey Hepburn that he calls his masterpiece.'' Akin to an animated mannequin, she seems as much a product of his background in theatrics as an example of advanced technology.

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. That's because she's not real. She was created by a machine.

At the tail end of 2017, Amazon announced that both its unlimited music service and Echo speaker would head to 28 more countries. This packaged expansion seems to be their theme in 2018, as the company stated both would be coming to Australia and New Zealand early in the new year. Today, it confirmed that Amazon Music Unlimited would launch in those countries on February 1st with Echoes on sale at select retailers early that month. While the rollout might be good for Australians and New Zealanders who want Echoes for themselves, it'll be harder for Amazon to wean them off other music streaming services, like Spotify, which has been available in Australia since 2012. At the least, Amazon Music Unlimited is priced competitively.

CHICAGO, Jan. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Narrative Science, the leader in Advanced Natural Language Generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise, today announced the availability of its third annual research report, "Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise 2018." In partnership with the National Business Research Institute (NBRI), Narrative Science surveyed business executives from a wide array of functions, including business intelligence, finance, and product management, to understand the use, value, and impact of AI throughout their businesses. Narrative Science's analysis of the data revealed key findings, including the compelling discovery that almost two-thirds of enterprises utilized AI in 2017.