It's been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it's used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games, producing stories like this one and tweets like this: Landon beat Whitman 34-0; https://t.co/V6zVPi7a9O The Associated Press has used robots to automate earnings coverage, while USA Today has used video software to create short videos. But media executives are more excited about AI's potential to go beyond rote reporting. Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at the Post, shared what the paper has learned so far from robo reporting and what it's still trying to figure out.

In recent years, robots have been taking on a number of tasks previously considered impossible, and along the way proving us wrong about the extent of their capabilities. Well, last night the humanoid robot known as YuMi--a clever combination of the words'you and me'--did just that when he conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra at the Verdi Theatre in Pisa, Italy. Also present was Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Rehearsals were allowed for the robot to memorize and incorporate the precise hand movements and gestures used by resident conductor Andrea Colombini. This was assuming, no doubt, that the musicians were able to maintain a consistent tempo.

Results highlight performance of Theano's current full release which does not support CuDNN 6 while all other frameworks do. I don't see how using half baked beta versions for benchmarking is the right way of running the tests. All frameworks can claim that their next beta version has better performance but they also have unresolved issues. Also CuDNN 7 is already available and if tests are run using beta versions, eventually some will support 7 versus Theano's beta support for CuDNN 6 causing the same issue. I hope you see the point I am trying to make.

On a recent trip to New York City, I found myself with only 30 minutes to travel 2 miles between meetings. In the past, this would have meant getting soaked while I walked (or ran) to a major intersection and tried to hail a cab. Now, I keep dry in the lobby for 3 minutes while I wait for an Uber. Traditionally, we've relied on highly-trained specialists to get things done. Call a company to dispatch you one.

Come January, the "Westworld" concept of lifelike sex robots will get one step closer. That's when a San Marcos company will unveil Harmony, an anatomically correct sex doll with a patented animatronic talking head with programmable personality and memory. News of creator Matt McMullen's latest invention -- he's been making lifelike silicone sex dolls for 20 years -- has created international media interest and a firestorm of criticism from ethicists and futurists who see a dark side to a sex doll that becomes more "human" with each technological innovation. One critic worries that the doll's artificial intelligence app could be hacked to make it kill its owner (like the vengeance meted out by sex robots in the film "Ex Machina" and TV show "Westworld"). And women's advocates say owners could realistically rehearse plans for violent sexual acts with the interactive dolls.

The rise of artificial intelligence in journalism brings up many questions about the future of reporting. Robots are taking our jobs, no doubt about it. Just in the past year we've seen barista robots, fast-food robots, pizza delivery robots, and even a robot conducting a symphony orchestra. But robots can't replace journalists, right? The dogged reporters, members of the vaunted Fourth Estate, the men and women who bring us the news stories we read every day?

Recently, digital music libraries have been developed and can be plainly accessed. Latest research showed that current organization and retrieval of music tracks based on album information are inefficient. Moreover, they demonstrated that people use emotion tags for music tracks in order to search and retrieve them. In this paper, we discuss separability of a set of emotional labels, proposed in the categorical emotion expression, using Fisher's separation theorem. We determine a set of adjectives to tag music parts: happy, sad, relaxing, exciting, epic and thriller. Temporal, frequency and energy features have been extracted from the music parts. It could be seen that the maximum separability within the extracted features occurs between relaxing and epic music parts. Finally, we have trained a classifier using Support Vector Machines to automatically recognize and generate emotional labels for a music part. Accuracy for recognizing each label has been calculated; where the results show that epic music can be recognized more accurately (77.4%), comparing to the other types of music.

The loss or corruption of data segments of considerable duration is a very common issue in data restoration and transmission. In audio applications in particular, the insertion of perceptually pleasing content is very important. A good insertion would prevent audible artifacts and provide a coherent and meaningful signal to the listener who would, optimally, remain unaware that any problem has occurred. This task has recently become known as audio inpainting [1], but has previously been referred to e.g. as audio interpolation [2] or waveform substitution [3]. Audio inpainting aims at reconstructing missing parts of an audio signal. When missing parts have a length no longer than 50ms, sparsity-based techniques can be successful [1], [4], [5].

This semester I'll be writing my specialization project thesis, which will be about mind controlled drones. Most of the project will be processing and analyzing the signals from the sensor headset, and classifying these signals so that I can use them to control the drone. I am considering trying something a bit different than what people have been doing before on this project: I want to use reinforcement learning to teach the drone to fly the way I want. I am by no means an machine learning expert, and would like to hear what you guys think about this approach. Is there an other approach you think would work better?

In the future, Facebook wants to replace clicking buttons and tapping on screens with natural conversations. The idea, according to Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, is users could ask Facebook for an update on a family member, the news or even to suggest a friend they haven't seen in while they might want to catch up with. "I think of it as a full-time, 24/7 personal assistant that helps me stay connected with all the things I care about in the world," Schroepfer said. "That is beyond the reach of current technology." Now, a Montreal-based team will be working to help make the technology a reality.