There has been fascinating work on creating artistic transformations of images by Gatys. This was revolutionary in how we can in some sense alter the 'style' of an image while generally preserving its 'content'. In our work, we present a method for creating new sounds using a similar approach, treating it as a style-transfer problem, starting from a random-noise input signal and iteratively using back-propagation to optimize the sound to conform to filter-outputs from a pre-trained neural architecture of interest. For demonstration, we investigate two different tasks, resulting in bandwidth expansion/compression, and timbral transfer from singing voice to musical instruments. A feature of our method is that a single architecture can generate these different audio-style-transfer types using the same set of parameters which otherwise require different complex hand-tuned diverse signal processing pipelines.

We tested every streaming box you can buy, and our two favorite are both great devices--but which one is right for you? The Roku Ultra retails for $99.99. Roku is developing its own voice assistant and will begin licensing its tech standards to other product makers in hopes of making it easier to expand consumers' home-streaming video setups. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based TV streaming tech company plans to have its Roku voice-powered Entertainment Assistant update available this fall for most Roku TVs and players. Roku also is launching new Roku Connect software that other device makers can license to create smart speakers and sound bars that will automatically link wirelessly to Roku TVs and media players.

The Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) will again be well-represented at the 2018 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, taking over Las Vegas Jan. 9-12. This is the second of two stories looking at what some of MESA's members will be showcasing at the largest technology show in the world. Accenture: The expanding connectivity and uses of artificial intelligence (AI), the fueling of the Internet of Things (IoT) by fifth-generation (5G) networks, and the growing consumer applications of blockchain technology will be key stories to watch at the show, according to Gregory Roberts, managing director of Accenture's North American high-tech industry practice. "Additional stories to track will be products becoming more software-smart and the use of in-vehicle AI to drive the connected car market," he said. The expanding connectivity and uses of AI will be a central storyline at CES, he predicted, adding: "The story will be about more pervasive use of the technology than at last year's CES, spanning a wider range of applications, connecting to more devices and networks."

Artificial Intelligence The issue of the impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace has already seen action in Congress in the context of a debate over autonomous vehicles. Under current law, driving rules are set by states. Last year, the House passed H.R. 388, the SE:F DRIVE Act, and the Senate is …

The following excerpts are from an interview with Marvin Minsky which took place at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 23rd, 1991. The interview, which is included in its entirety as a Foreword in the book Understanding Music with AI: Perspectives on Music Cognition (edited by Mira Balaban, Kemal Ebcioglu, and Otto Laske), is a conversation about music, its peculiar features as a human activity, the special problems it poses for the scientist, and the suitability of AI methods for clarifying and/or solving some of these problems. The conversation is open-ended, and should be read accordingly, as a discourse to be continued at another time. OL: I wish we could read people's brains when they are engaged in music-making. Since that is, alas, beyond the state of the art of AI, we are forced to deal with such epistemological issues as how to represent knowledge on the basis of what people tell us they do, which in most cases isn't very close to what they are actually doing.

Apple's delayed HomePod is coming to challenge smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The device will use Siri as its intelligent assistant front end, and is supposed to sound pretty good to boot. Now, according to a report at 9to5Mac and confirmed on our own iPhones, Siri includes a new ability to play you a podcast when asked what the news is. The feature appears in the latest iOS beta, 11.2.5, which is available for developers now. When you ask, "Hey Siri, give me the news," you'll get a daily news podcast from The Washington Post.

What does it mean for you to do "y * dy/dx" and "y (dy/dx)2"? I mean, are you doing elementwise operations? Also could you report the magnitude on the plot of both "y" and "dy/dx"? My guess is that the norm of the gradient might be very small and thus y dy/dx 2 and you would basically be doing SGD. Also, I don't think you finetuned well SGD RMSprop and so on as they should also give excellent results on MNIST.

"We should study Science Fiction in order to understand what someday could become Science Fact." This is the time of year when everyone makes his or her predictions for 2018. I have my predictions as well, but wanted to do something a bit more fun. So I thought I'd look backwards to the state of technology 50 years ago to gain some insights that we can use to make projections about 2018. That is, what "predictions" made in the 1950's might tell us about 2018.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, "Matrix"-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb? I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right.

With intelligent automation marching steadily toward broader adoption, media coverage of this historic technology disruption is turning increasingly alarmist. "New study: Artificial intelligence is coming for your jobs, millennials,"1 announced one business news outlet recently. "US workers face higher risk of being replaced by robots,"2 declared another. These dire headlines may deliver impressive click stats, but they don't consider a much more hopeful--and likely--scenario: In the near future, human workers and machines will work together seamlessly, each complementing the other's efforts in a single loop of productivity. And, in turn, HR organizations will begin developing new strategies and tools for recruiting, managing, and training a hybrid human-machine workforce. Notwithstanding sky-is-falling predictions, robotics, cognitive, and artificial intelligence (AI) will probably not displace most human workers. Yes, these tools offer opportunities to automate some repetitive low-level tasks. Perhaps more importantly, intelligent automation solutions may be able to augment human performance by automating certain parts of a task, thus freeing individuals to focus on more "human" aspects that require empathic problem-solving abilities, social skills, and emotional intelligence. For example, if retail banking transactions were automated, bank tellers would be able to spend more time interacting with and advising customers--and selling products.