General Electric Co. is working on a way to use artificial intelligence in electricity grids, a technology that it expects will save $200 billion globally by …

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don't you get mad? Xiaoice: You should ask my father. LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?

This year, the iPhone turned 10. Its launch heralded a new era in audience behavior that fundamentally changed how news organizations would think about how their work is discovered, distributed and consumed. This summer, as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I've been looking at another technology I think could lead to a similar step change in how publishers relate to their audiences: AI-driven voice interfaces, such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home and Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Apple's upcoming HomePod. The more I've spoken to the editorial and technical leads building on these platforms in different news organizations, as well as the tech companies developing them, the more I've come to this view: This is potentially bigger than the impact of the iPhone. In fact, I'd describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they'll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn't even know it's standing on.

Digital publishers and online content creators are always adapting. Few industries have more moving parts than the publishing space, yet the rewards of a $70 billion dollar ad industry, with 20% year over year growth, provides more than enough incentive to stay current with all the variables in the field. The biggest buzzwords and trends in the digital publishing space right now are "artificial intelligence" and "data science". A quick analysis of popular industry conference topics will instantly highlight just how popular these terms have become for publishers recently. However, the rise of these subjects underlines something even more important… the vast importance of data and what publishers should be doing with it. Below, I'll deliver some of the key points I recently discussed at Pubtelligence -- which was hosted at Google.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering says there are two things you can do to stop nefarious actors from forcing you into FaceID. According to Federighi, "If you don't stare at the phone, it won't unlock," & "If you grip the buttons on both sides of the phone when you hand it over, it will temporarily disable Face ID." Clearly, iPhone X owners will have to practice their squeezing techniques. It would be painful and costly to be held up and discover that you were squeezing it all wrong. The ACLU & the EFF recently sued the DHS for searching the phones and laptops of 11 plaintiffs at the US border without a warrant. The group of plaintiffs includes 10 US citizens and one lawful permanent resident, several of whom are Muslims or people of color.

Two days ago, an article quoting Hinton who was saying that backprop is not necessarily the way to go for AI, generated lots of very cool discussion on this sub-reddit (here). The discussion mainly went in the direction of asking what are alternatives to backprop. In this discussion I would like us to answer the question: what are the problems of backprop? Here's my initial input: Problems that seem to be intrinsic to backprop: Problems that currently pose lots of difficulties and we're not sure are possible with backprop: Do you agree with these? What other problems have you noticed during your work?

When the iPhone X was unveiled this week, its facial recognition feature immediately made headlines. Owners of the £1,000 phone can bypass the pesky password and just use their face to unlock their device. Aside from the obvious pitfalls (even the Apple demonstration didn't work seamlessly), it's evident that a world where facial ID software becomes commonplace is one that could spiral out of control. For researchers Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, the dangers of such kinds of technology are paramount. In order to make their point, they shared the results of a study.

Movies are the best outlet for human imagination and creativity. This is where all far-fetched imagination, things deemed technologically impossible at one time or ones that don't exist yet, come to life. We as humans think a lot, about everything. We want to explain the unexplained, extend our limits and make things easy. This curiosity often gives rise to great ideas.

If you heard Taryn Southern's new single "Break Free" on the radio, you'd probably just keep driving or grocery shopping, or doing whatever you do in places that still have radios playing. The song is a big, moody ballad -- the kind that might play during the climax of a Steven Spielberg movie. "Break Free" wasn't composed by a John Williams copycat, but by artificial intelligence. The song is not a fluke or a novelty for Southern either; she's using artificial intelligence platforms to create an entire album, called I AM AI. It's the first LP to be entirely composed and produced with AI. Southern used an open source AI platform called Amper Music to create the stems of "Break Free."