Researchers have identified an incredibly smart method used by fruit flies to categorise odours – and it's so clever it could be applied to powering recommendation algorithms for the likes of Netflix or Spotify. In the same way that YouTube might want to flag up videos similar to the one you've just watched, fruit flies – like many other animals – need to know which smells are similar, for finding food and avoiding poisonous substances. The team from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has found that fruit flies have an especially clever way of categorising odours which lets them recognise differences with a very fine level of accuracy. "In the natural world, you're not going to encounter exactly the same odour every time; there's going to be some noise and fluctuation," says one of the researchers, Saket Navlakha from Salk. "But if you smell something that you've previously associated with a behaviour, you need to be able to identify that similarity and recall that behaviour."

It's difficult for some people to imagine at this point, but dedicated point and shoot cameras used to be a big part of our lives. Anytime people went out to celebrate, traveled somewhere on vacation, or went to a family gathering, they would bring cameras with them to capture those memories. These days … Read more: Google's new photography apps for iOS and Android use AI to do things other apps can't

If you care more about your smart speaker's sound than which digital assistant it employs, the new Google Home Max speaker should be on your holiday short list. After days of pumping an eclectic range of music through Google's $399 speaker -- from AC/DC to the Three Tenors -- it's clear the Google Home Max is in a class by itself when it comes to filling a home or apartment with sounds even an audiophile could appreciate. Admittedly, for many people the decision to purchase this or that voice-activated smart speaker has often boiled down to which AI-infused digital assistant you're most comfortable engaging with in your home, most likely Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant. But when music is the priority, different features come into play. Certainly, at $399 there is a high price to pay for such sonic joy.

It's no secret today that all our applications and devices are generating tons of data; thus making data analytics a very hot topic. Microsoft Azure has all the tools necessary to ingest, manage, and process all this data, which is also known as Big Data. However, all this data in and of itself is not useful unless processed, interpreted, and visualized correctly. Another power behind the data acquired through the years is to make Predictive Analytics, that is, using the data to make forecasts and predictions. But, by only using the data gathered, it is difficult to make an analysis.

Mr. Robot (USA, 10 p.m.): Rather than trying to make the rabbit hole even deeper, in its third year Mr. Robot settled on a solid plan of crafting itself into a fleet and satisfying thriller. There's still plenty of misdirection and mystery, but after an uneven beginning, the show has successfully followed the execution of stage two with verve and daring. Tonight the season comes to an end, and Alex McLevy will be there to see what's left standing. Comedy Central Special: The Fake News With Ted Nelms (Comedy Central, 10 p.m.): Ed Helms dons his news anchor alter-ego, Ted Nelms, for this nonstop barrage of jokes in the form of a one-hour special.

Do humans have the capacity for safe AI? Our history shows innovation and technology advancements are replete with unintended consequences. Who knew that widespread social-media adoption would lead to disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining liberal democracy, when it was originally thought it would increase civic engagement? After all, AI not only enables the development of autonomous vehicles, but also autonomous weapons. Who wants to contemplate a possible future where self-aware AI becomes catatonically depressed while in possession of nuclear launch codes?

As noted in the first chapter of our previous Trends report, artificial intelligence (AI) is now concentrated in the hands of a small group of technology players who control the user discovery path from beginning to end. This level of control by a handful of major corporations is a cause for concern. Fortunately, filter bubbles and advances in recommendation and predictive technologies can be used to your advantage if you know how. " Technology giants, not the government, are building the artificially intelligent future. And unless the government vastly increases how much it spends on research into such technologies, it is the corporations that will decide how to deploy them " As things currently stand, artificial intelligence is more a promise for the future than a fine-tuned cluster of technologies.

I am working with a 20 layer deep CNN whose output is a softmax over 3 classes. When I use a depth of 32 for all conv layer, i observe a smooth convergence to the expected output. However, when i only change the depth of all conv layers to 64, i observe the following: After initialization a reasonable amount of variance in the outputs for different inputs is present. Then, during training the variance gradually vanishes, until it seems that only bias is learned. Apparently, the gradient w.r.t to the conv weights vanishes over time.

High-level services to accelerate the development of AI solutions. This includes conversational AI with Azure Bot Service, trained models such as Cognitive Services (pre-built APIs and custom AI services), allowing developers to use their own data with algorithms trained for their specific needs, and full custom AI services such as Azure Machine Learning.