We're one step closer to finding out what a live-action Pokémon film looks like. Legendary Pictures has already nabbed writers for its Detective Pikachu movie (in the form of Guardians of the Galaxy scribe Nicole Perlman and Gravity Falls penman Alex Hirsch), and now it's secured a lead as well. Rising talent Justice Smith -- best known for playing the protagonist on Baz Luhrmann's short-lived Netflix show The Get Down -- has been tapped to star in the film based on the Nintendo 3DS game, according to Variety. Rob Letterman (Monsters vs. Aliens, Goosebumps) is directing. It's unclear at this stage who Smith is playing in the flick -- we're guessing he won't don a yellow onesie for the role of the titular character (although, he could be voicing a CGI Pikachu). Before then, the 22-year-old is on track to gain a lot more exposure, thanks to the upcoming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Here at WIRED, we like Sonos speakers. Throughout the last five years, we've reviewed everything from its small Play:1 speaker to its soundbars and recommended every one of them. But it's not cheap to turn your home into a Sonos-powered shrine to sound. Like Apple products, Sonos speakers are built to work with other Sonos speakers, and don't come cheap, starting at $200 for the least expensive, smallest model. But which ones should you buy? Read on for our recommendations.

Correlation matrices are omnipresent in multivariate data analysis. When the number $d$ of variables is large, the sample estimates of correlation matrices are typically noisy and conceal underlying dependence patterns. We consider the case when the variables can be grouped into $K$ clusters with exchangeable dependence; an assumption often made in applications in finance and econometrics. Under this partial exchangeability condition, the corresponding correlation matrix has a block structure and the number of unknown parameters is reduced from $d(d-1)/2$ to at most $K(K+1)/2$. We propose a robust algorithm based on Kendall's rank correlation to identify the clusters without assuming the knowledge of $K$ a priori or anything about the margins except continuity. The corresponding block-structured estimator performs considerably better than the sample Kendall rank correlation matrix when $K < d$. Even in the unstructured case $K = d$, though there is no gain asymptotically, the new estimator can be much more efficient in finite samples. When the data are elliptical, the results extend to linear correlation matrices and their inverses. The procedure is illustrated on financial stock returns.

Peter Cullen and the head of the famous character he voices, Optimus Prime. Peter Cullen and the head of the famous character he voices, Optimus Prime. For a generation of 1980s-reared cartoon-loving television viewers, Peter Cullen's voice as Optimus Prime in movies, TV shows, video games and even toys is instantly recognizable. He has continued to voice the character on and off throughout the years, and returned to Optimus earlier this year in Michael Bay's "Transformers: The Last Knight," which made more than $605 million worldwide this summer. In next year's "Bumblebee," the Transformers spin-off film that recently wrapped filming, Cullen's red, silver and blue Optimus Prime figures in the plot focused on the smaller but ever-popular yellow-and-black Autobot.

The Sonos One is the company's first voice-activated speaker, letting users control their music via Amazon's Alexa assistant. When we reviewed it back in October, editor Nathan Ingraham called it the best-sounding smart speaker you can buy. But when it launched, the Sonos One's voice control features didn't work with Spotify, though Sonos promised it this integration would arrive by December 21. It turns out it's here early; Alexa can now use Spotify to to play your favorite album, artist, playlist or song on the Sonos One. If you have Sonos speakers, but not the Sonos One smart speaker, this news is still relevant to you.

When he was 8 years old, Matt Reeves started making 8-millimeter movies inspired by his love for the original "Planet of the Apes." "I'd have my friends put on gorilla masks and run around shooting these little sci-fi films," he recalls. "As a kid, I was captivated by these images of horses with apes on them." Decades later, Reeves, perched on a sofa in his tidy Hollywood office, has taken his fascination with primate cinema to a whole new level as the auteur behind the 2014 performance-capture blockbuster "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" and this summer's "War for the Planet of the Apes." Taking the reins from "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" director Rupert Wyatt, Reeves, lauded for his low-budget horror hit "Cloverfield," initially harbored reservations about helming Twentieth Century Fox's multimillion-dollar franchise.

"Mortal Kombat: Annihilation," the sequel film to 1995's "Mortal Kombat," came out on this day 20 years ago. The movie, which was based on the popular fighting video game, was released on Nov. 21, 1997. Despite currently having a three percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film opened in theaters to $16 million, making it No. 1 at the box office that weekend. It ended up taking in a little over $50 million worldwide. Despite not having the best reception at the box office, for years there were plans to make a third film in the franchise.

This year, STOA's Annual Lecture will focus upon how media and other information is managed and distributed in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes how AI can be used to disseminate quality information as well as misinformation, as well as how algorithms can be used to counteract fake news. At their most simple, they are sets of rules and instructions, usually expressed in computer code, followed in order to solve a problem. For example, applying rules to historical data about people to decide which information to send to them. Algorithms have been around for a long time – longer than AI, and even longer than computers.

Do you believe that artificial intelligence is poised to significantly improve our societies, or do you imagine extreme dangers resulting from this technology in the future? Tech moguls Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been publicly debating this issue recently, with Musk claiming that Zuckerberg's knowledge about AI is "limited". The Tesla CEO and outspoken innovator has been pushing for the proactive regulation of artificial intelligence based on his belief that the technology is a "fundamental existential risk for human civilization." On the other side, Zuckerberg has denounced Musk's warnings, calling his statements "pretty irresponsible." While many academics, such as Pedro Domingos, a professor who works on machine learning at the University of Michigan, believe that Musk's nightmare scenarios could eventually happen, but his perspective is entirely wrong.

We propose a novel approach for the generation of polyphonic music based on LSTMs. We generate music in two steps. First, a chord LSTM predicts a chord progression based on a chord embedding. A second LSTM then generates polyphonic music from the predicted chord progression. The generated music sounds pleasing and harmonic, with only few dissonant notes. It has clear long-term structure that is similar to what a musician would play during a jam session. We show that our approach is sensible from a music theory perspective by evaluating the learned chord embeddings. Surprisingly, our simple model managed to extract the circle of fifths, an important tool in music theory, from the dataset.