Smart speakers are everywhere this year. So far, we've seen new entries from Apple, Amazon, Google and Sonos. Now, Microsoft is finally ready to join the party. The Harman Kardon Invoke is the first speaker to feature Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant. Since it's coming from a brand known for audio gear, it promises better sound than the competition.

Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker, debuting Thursday for $199.95, may end up following in the footsteps of notable Microsoft-powered devices like Nokia's Windows phones: lovely hardware that's slightly tripped up by Microsoft's software and services. The soul of Harman's elegant, cylindrical smart speaker is Cortana, the digital assistant that lives within Windows 10. Cortana deftly steps in during the business day to manage reminders, answer questions about your schedule, reply to general queries about the weather, nearby restaurants, and place calls via Skype. She also serves as the majordomo for your digital home. The inherent tension between a productivity-minded assistant and a consumer-oriented device gives the Invoke a bit of a split personality, and we've split our stories as well.

I would recommend that you start with Introduction to Statistical Learning with R (usually shortened as ISLR). A lot of people have adapted the examples to Python if you google a bit and it's an excellent book that hides just enough complexity to not be overwhelming. Plus, once you have a good understanding of all of it, you can either graduate to the more extensive version (Elements of Statistical Learning, usually shortened as ESL) for a more rigorous treatment of the same thing, or choose to go for something different like Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. ISLR is free as a pdf and has a corresponding MOOC. ESL doesn't, but is also free on the author's website.

We could say our 30th annual list of the most transformative products and discoveries required trucks full of experts, hours of toil, and countless friendship-ending debates. That's true, but you just want the good stuff. A robot just made me french fries. Delicious, they cooked for four minutes less than the instructions dictated. One minute less, they'd've been soggy.

The Sonos One wireless speaker, priced at $199, will be available Oct. 24. It will support multiple voice services, launching with Amazon Alexa, but will add Siri using AirPlay 2, and Google Assistant, in 2018. Sonos is upping the volume in the smart speaker race. Already well-known for its great sounding wireless home speakers, Sonos is bringing to market the first whole home speaker system with built-in voice control using Amazon's digital voice-commanded assistant Alexa. The new speaker, the $199 Sonos One, due out Tuesday, raises the bar for good-sounding smart speakers.

Remember Swing, SWT and the likes of wxWidgets? We had to reinvent them for the browser world. Several new UI programming models emerged, which mostly focused on components. We had to find a way to design, build, and test apps while keeping them responsive (a term we use to describe a website that doesn't look like crap on a mobile phone). We also needed to keep it slim -- not everybody has a fast connection, but everybody has a browser in their pockets.

By its very nature, virtual reality is an immersive medium. But for Rama Allen, that bar is higher. The interactive artist and Executive Creative Director at The Mill has made a name for himself leading inter-disciplinary teams of designers, filmmakers, coders, editors, engineers and VFX artists to create new kinds of cinematic experiences. At the inaugural Engadget Experience, a tech-art installation happening in LA next month, Allen will share some of his strangest creations, including a collaboration with an emotional AI; a VR experience that uses biometrics for levitation; a sculpting tool for the human voice; and a mixed-reality galactic journey to spread peace across the universe. Buy your tickets here, and hurry because discounted pricing ends next week, on October 27th.

Jefferson Graham tests the Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone camera--is it the best one ever, as some have said? He compares to the Apple iPhone 8 Plus in a beach shootout on #Talking Tech. LOS ANGELES -- OK Google, we love the new Pixel XL 2 smartphone as a camera, but alas, for photos and videos, our hearts go to the Apple iPhone 8 Plus. With each new smartphone release, critics are quick to dub a new one as the best mobile camera out there. We said just that last year about the then-new Google Pixel, which won our 2017 shootout. Months have gone by, and many new mobile cameras have been released.

Recent scandals around fake news have spurred an interest in programmatically gauging the journalistic quality of an article. Companies like Factmata and Full Fact have received funding from Google, and Facebook has launched its "Journalism Project" earlier this year to fight the spread of fake stories in its feed. Discriminating between facts and fake information is a daunting task but often times, looking at the publisher is a good proxy to gauge the journalistic quality of an article. And while there is no objective metric to evaluate the quality of a newspaper, its overall quality and political bias is generally agreed upon (one can for example refer to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/). In this article, we present a few techniques to automatically assess the journalistic quality of a newspaper.

The BBC wants to leverage machine learning to improve its online services and the programmes it commissions every year. Today, the broadcaster announced a five-year research partnership with eight universities from across the UK. Data scientists will help the best and brightest at the BBC set up the "Data Science Research Partnership," tasked with being "at the forefront of the machine learning in the media industry." It will tackle a range of projects not just with the BBC, but media and technology organisations from across Europe. The larger aim is to take the results, or learnings, and apply them directly to the BBC's operations in Britain.