Walt Disney Co.'s "Captain Marvel" is expected to open with a spectacular $100 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada alone next month. And yet, according to the highly influential website Rotten Tomatoes, only 28% of moviegoers are interested in seeing Marvel Studios' first superhero film with a solo female lead. Blame online trolls, who have previously waged campaigns to lower audience ratings for movies including "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and "Ghostbusters" by flooding their pages with negative, sometimes sexist comments. Such "review bombing" efforts are a serious problem for Rotten Tomatoes, which depends on credible ratings to drive traffic to its free website. The company, owned by the largest online movie ticket seller, Fandango, now has a plan to curb the abuse.

Over two months since Apple Music landed on Amazon Echo, it's now set for another smart speaker that isn't the HomePod. A listing for the music streaming service has been spotted inside the Google Home app for iOS by a Mac Rumors reader. Though it's currently not live, the update (Apple Music was previously slotted in the app's "limited availability" section) indicates that it could be imminent. Until December, the HomePod was the only smart speaker with Apple Music availability. That changed with its arrival on the Echo, and its Google Home debut would put it on all three leading smart speakers.

Badri is the Senior Vice President, Technology at Vonage - Video Engineering. As I speak with business leaders from around the world, I'm continually surprised by two important realities that seem to go unnoticed and that are poised to transform the way companies engage with their customers. First, while artificial intelligence (AI) remains a buzzword, many people are still unaware of how advanced algorithms have become. We're not talking about a collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts which Netflix shows you'll want to watch next. Today's algorithms are able to mimic human decision-making on tasks as complex as composing music and predicting what topics are of interest to your Congressional representatives.

Attention mechanisms have seen wide adoption in neural NLP models. In addition to improving predictive performance, these are often touted as affording transparency: models equipped with attention provide a distribution over attended-to input units, and this is often presented (at least implicitly) as communicating the relative importance of inputs. However, it is unclear what relationship exists between attention weights and model outputs. In this work, we perform extensive experiments across a variety of NLP tasks that aim to assess the degree to which attention weights provide meaningful `explanations' for predictions. We find that they largely do not. For example, learned attention weights are frequently uncorrelated with gradient-based measures of feature importance, and one can identify very different attention distributions that nonetheless yield equivalent predictions. Our findings show that standard attention modules do not provide meaningful explanations and should not be treated as though they do. Code for all experiments is available at https://github.com/successar/AttentionExplanation.

From Vincross, the folks who brought you the HEXA robot, is a new Kickstarter for MIND KIT, a modular robotics development platform that you can use to build that robot that you've always wanted but doesn't exist yet. "A robot that keeps hugging you and won't leave you alone" is either the best thing ever, or a horror movie. Worth the risk, I'd say. It's nice that the system is so modular, and also that it looks like there's a strong emphasis on manipulation, which you don't always get from robotics kits that tend to be primarily mobile bases and not much else out of the box. There's also some built-in functionality, like map-making that works with the mobile base and lidar module. Specs-wise, the brain module contains a quad-core 1.2 GHz processor with 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage.