Back in September, Amazon announced that its Video Skills Kit would open the doors to Alexa support for third-party video apps. Now, Hulu has announced that the video streaming app now works with Alexa voice commands. Starting today, users who have a Fire TV device can call up their favorite shows with a simple voice command -- "Alexa, watch The Handmaid's Tale." If you have a Live TV subscription, you can also ask Alexa to switch to a certain TV channel ("Alexa, watch ESPN.") It's nice to see Amazon give competing video apps the same perks as its own Prime Video through the use of the Video Skills Kit.

If you were looking forward to a new episode of "Arrow" tonight, then this news might be a bit disappointing. The hit CW series will not be airing tonight because the network switched around its broadcast schedule this week, and its latest new episode aired this past Monday night instead. The reason for this change was to accommodate the four-show crossover event, "Crisis on Earth-X," with "Supergirl," "Arrow," "The Flash" and "DC's Legends of Tomorrow." With the "Arrow" part of the crossover airing on Monday night after "Supergirl," it allowed for the event to take place over two nights instead of three, and also prevented the flow from breaking up due to the usual Wednesday block of superhero-less programming. The scheduling for "Arrow" will go back to normal next week, just in time for its Season 6 midseason finale.

Artificial Intelligence is not just a project for the biggest names in tech. Starting in 2018 1 million US dollars will be invested in the African AI start-up as part of the AI Revolution Challenge.

While China has invested an enormous amount in artificial intelligence in recent years, most video analysis systems are currently used in national security, including defence and anti-terrorism activities.

"When I went to grab something, I could feel myself grabbing it. When I thought about moving this or that finger, it would move almost right away," Keven Walgamott said. "I don't know how to describe it except that it was like I had a hand again." Walgamott was describing the results of an experimental surgery to The Washington Post, where a prosthetic known as the "Luke" arm had been attached with electrodes implanted into his nerves. The real estate agent had lost his hand and most of his arm in an electrical accident 14 years ago, and he volunteered for the program at the University of Utah.

Warner Bros. vision of what the interior of a self-driving car with augmented reality could look like if configured to be like the Batmobile (Photo: Warner Bros./Intel) LOS ANGELES -- One of the nation's most prominent technology companies announced a deal Wednesday with a major Hollywood studio to try to jointly figure out how to keep people occupied entertainment as they are driven. Intel, a company that has become a major player in self-driving technology through the acquisition of automotive sensor maker Mobileye earlier this year, will partner with Warner Bros. to convert a self-driving car into one that becomes an experimental entertainment pod. The announcement was made at the Los Angeles Auto Show here. What do Audi, Volvo, Tesla and GM have in common? Yes, they all make cars. But they're also all customers of Israel's Mobileye, which had an initial public offering this time last year.

Suppose I have a classification neuralnet for which I compute the confusion matrix on the validation set after my network has converged. What ways are there of using this matrix to reliably increase the accuracy on unseen data? I know of setting a per-class minimum confidence threshold. But would it make sense to reponder the softmax predictions knowing that some class A is often misclassified as B by the network etc...?

Far from the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence is becoming just another tool for developers to build the next big thing. It's built in to Photoshop to help you knock out backgrounds, Google is using AI to figure out if you have a person peeping on your phone and Microsoft uses the technology to teach you Chinese. As Amazon's Jeff Barr says, "I think it is safe to say, with the number of practical applications for machine learning, including computer vision and deep learning, that we've turned the corner" towards practical applications for AI. To that end, Amazon has announced AWS DeepLens, a new video camera that runs deep learning models right on the device. The DeepLens has a 4 megapixel camera that can capture 1080P video, along with a 2D microphone array.

I have a new visual essay up at The Pudding, using text mining to explore how women are portrayed in film. In April 2016, we broke down film dialogue by gender. The essay presented an imbalance in which men delivered more lines than women across 2,000 screenplays. But quantity of lines is only part of the story. What characters do matters, too. Gender tropes (e.g., women are pretty/men act, men don't cry) are just as important as dialogue in understanding how men and women are portrayed on-screen.

Entertainment and advertising already pervade our homes and our smartphones. Before long, they'll be everywhere in our cars -- not just on the sound system and on little screens, but throughout the entire passenger compartment, even on the windows. Brian Krzanich, chief executive at computer chip maker Intel, on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Warner Bros. to create "immersive experiences" inside driverless cars. Speaking to auto industry insiders at Automobility LA -- the four-day preview event ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show -- Krzanich said the companies will build proof-of-concept entertainment and advertising platforms using trademarked fictional characters to demonstrate how people might occupy themselves while a robot does the driving. Someone who otherwise would have been driving might instead pretend to be Batman, Krzanich said, as an augmented reality system projected images on windows to make it seem like the car was zipping through Gotham City. In a press release, Intel said those same windows "will enable passengers to view advertising and other discovery experiences."