Media
Hulu's 'Future Man' is a sometimes predictable but enjoyable trip back to the future
"Future Man," which begins streaming Tuesday on Hulu, is a dark and sunny time travel comedy that, like a goofball "Stranger Things," wears its influences on its sleeve, around its neck and on the top of its head. Created by Howard Overman (whose straight genre credits include "Misfits" and "Atlantis") with Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter โ who co-wrote the impertinent Pixar parody "Sausage Party" with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who produce and direct here โ it is, as those names might suggest, profane, obscene, sanguinary, silly and suspenseful by turns. Josh Hutcherson ("The Hunger Games") plays Josh Futturman, a janitor at a pharmaceutical research company who still lives in his childhood room and obsessively plays a never-beaten video game in which the last gasp of ordinary humanity battles the genetically perfect people who want to erase them from Earth. He also has heroic masturbatory fantasies about one of its characters, Tiger. Whole comic empires would crumble.)
The Morning After: Tuesday, November 14th 2017
While we prepare for The Engadget Experience today in Los Angeles, you can take a look back Monday's biggest stories, including yet another terrifying robot from the good folks at Boston Dynamics. No PC or base station required.HTC Vive Focus is a standalone VR headset with'world-scale' tracking After a couple of teases earlier this year, HTC has finally unveiled its upcoming standalone VR headset at today's Vive Developer Conference in Beijing. Dubbed the Vive Focus, this all-in-one device features inside-out 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) "world-scale" tracking, meaning it doesn't require external base stations nor sensors, so you can get positional tracking anywhere at any time -- even on a train or plane, should you wish to. It's official.Amazon is making a'Lord of the Rings' TV series Here's what we know so far: Amazon's series "will explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring," and there's a possibility of a spinoff in the future. Now that Boston Dynamics has moved from Google/Alphabet ownership to Softbank, it apparently plans to keep the funky robot concepts coming.
WATCH: Video Of AI-Controlled Drones Killing With Ruthless Precision
A short film made by campaigners and scientists shows tiny drones hunting and killing with ruthless precision and without human guidance. The movie, released by the campaign group Stop Autonomous Weapons, highlights the perils of autonomous weapons falling into the wrong hands. It shows students in a school classroom being attacked by drones, armed with explosives. The drones identified and neutralized targets and did not need any instructions during the mission. This gruesome reminder of the destructive potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-integrated weapons displays autonomous drones that can find, follow and fire at targets independently.
Spotify: Analyzing and Predicting Songs โ ML Review โ Medium
If there's one thing I can't live without, it's not my phone or my laptop or my car -- it's music. I love music and getting lost in it. My inspiration for this project is finding out what it is about a song that I enjoy so much. After using Python and some data wrangling techniques, the data frame below is what I use to do some exploratory data analysis (EDA). Again, using Python, I was able to create this visualization of distributions between my Liked (blue) and Disliked (red) songs.
[D] What's the best way to augment data for text matching? โข r/MachineLearning
We're trying to train a model that predicts if a given question ( 20 words) is answered in a given paragraph ( 200 words). Paragraphs are all from Wikipedia. We're using a simple RNN where the question and paragraph are the two inputs. Each is separately converted into a representation through a GRU layer, the outputs are concatenated and run through a dense layer with 2 output nodes (each giving a probability for either class 1 or 2). Class 1 means that the question is not answered in that paragraph, class 2 means it is.
Today, world leaders will meet to decide the future of "killer robots"
A new short film illustrating the prospect of military drones has been commissioned for an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons, which is being hosted by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The film presents a fictionalized scenario in which a tech company showcases and deploys its latest combat drone, which is capable of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. A montage of mock new reports illustrates what happens next, when the device's true abilities are revealed and the machines begin killing off politicians and activists. Stuart Russell, an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, is part of the group that will show the film to attendees. He has stated that the technology depicted in the film already exists, and it would actually be much easier to implement than self-driving vehicles.
Evaluating gender portrayal in Bangladeshi TV
Hoque, Md. Naimul, Fatima, Rawshan E, Mandal, Manash Kumar, Saquib, Nazmus
Computer Vision and machine learning methods were previously used to reveal screen presence of genders in TV and movies [4]. In this work, using head pose, gender detection, and skin color estimation techniques, we demonstrate that the gender disparity in TV in a South Asian country such as Bangladesh exhibits unique characteristics and is sometimes counterintuitive to popular perception. We demonstrate a noticeable discrepancy in female screen presence in Bangladeshi TV advertisements and political talk shows. Further, contrary to popular hypotheses, we demonstrate that lighter-toned skin colors are less prevalent than darker complexions, and additionally, quantifiable body language markers do not provide conclusive insights about gender dynamics. Overall, these gender portrayal parameters reveal the different layers of onscreen gender politics and can help direct incentives to address existing disparities in a nuanced and targeted manner.
Amazon developing free version of video streaming service
Amazon is developing a free, ad-supported video streaming service, it has been claimed. The retail giant is believed to be planning to share ad revenue with TV networks in return for shows, according to Ad Age. The company is talking with TV networks, movie studios and other media companies about providing programming to the service, it says. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has shared some of the secrets of his success, hot on the heels of becoming the world's richest man. Ad Age says it wants to dive into back catalogs of TV and movie studios for the service, and is also going after lifestyle, travel, cooking and other shows that are a good fit for an e-commerce platform.
Forget killer robots - it's humans you should be worrying about instead
When it comes to understanding artificial intelligence, is science fiction just a pesky distraction from the real dangers out there? Microsoft's authority on all things AI seems to think so, reports Jihee Junn. "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," declared Elon Musk back in 2014. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like โ yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Over the years, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has regularly come out to express his concerns over the future of AI. He's even warned of a possible Terminator-style robot uprising, telling a group of US governors earlier this year: "I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal." Could the world really be terrorised by artificially sentient beings? Are we on the verge of creating our own existential threat? Does this mean we have to endure another resurrection of Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting career? For Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director of Microsoft Research, the likelihood of such a scenario occurring remains resoundingly low. "I think there's a much higher probability that humanity could wipe out humanity.