I'm working for a small start up and trying to follow some of the results in the literature that reconstruct 3D models from videos or images but it seems all of them use some datasets (mostly the Basel Face Model or facewarehouse) that are not accessible for commercial usage. Did anyone else encounter this issue? is there an affordable (or free) model available?

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?

Toronto Diary: Ethan Hawke plays a man of the cloth in the haunting'First Reformed' Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang on the double-Rachel feature (Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz) "Disobedience" and how TIFF 2017 has been a showcase of acting talent for the actress leads. Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang on the double-Rachel feature (Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz) "Disobedience" and how TIFF 2017 has been a showcase of acting talent for the actress leads. 'First Reformed,' 'Downsizing' bring climate change to the fore "Will God forgive us for destroying his creation?" The man asking the question is the Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke), an ex-military chaplain-turned-rural minister who finds himself undergoing a profound crisis of faith. He has already lost a son and a wife, and his insides are rotting from cancer, all of which might well drive even a devout believer to feel that God has abandoned him. But what genuinely haunts Toller, and inspires him to consider an act of extreme, violent desperation, is his eye-opening encounter with Michael (Philip Ettinger), a militant eco-activist who is terrified by the prospect of humanity's mass extinction. "First Reformed," Paul Schrader's somber, beautifully composed and entirely mesmerizing new drama, is not a work of particular subtlety. Its moral argument is as clear and crystalline as its images, shot by cinematographer Alexander Dynan in the nearly square academy-aspect ratio. The severity of Toller's convictions, as well as his disgust at the knowledge that his church has taken money from one of the town's biggest polluters, gives rise to an angry, confrontational question: Why have so many Christians rejected the science of climate change, effectively abdicated their God-given responsibility to look after the Earth?

In spite of the rapid development in data acquisition technology resulting in the explosive collection of acquired datasets, techniques such as data organization and classification, manipulation, and analysis of very large, diverse, heterogeneous datasets have only evolved modestly. This has led to hindrances in effective utility and better understanding of the acquired, large-scale data for knowledge discovery. In an industrial setting, an interesting visual from McKinsey illustrates that despite collecting data from tens of thousands of sensors, less than 1% is actually utilized. Data clustering is the classification of data objects into different groups (clusters) such that data objects in one group are similar together and dissimilar from another group. Typically, homogeneous data objects, i.e. data objects having the same data type, are grouped together using some of the well-known clustering algorithms.

Ever since the Associated Press automated the production and publication of quarterly earnings reports in 2014, algorithms that automatically generate news stories from structured, machine-readable data have been shaking up the news industry. The promises of this technology – often referred to as automated (or robot) journalism – are enticing: Once developed, such algorithms could create an unlimited number of news stories on a specific topic at little cost. And they could do it faster, cheaper, with fewer errors and in more languages than any human journalist ever could. This technology provides an opportunity to make money creating content for very small audiences – even, perhaps, customized news feeds for an audience of just one person. And when it works well, readers perceive the quality of automated news as on par with news written by human journalists. As a researcher and creator of automated journalism, I've found that computerized news reporting can offer key strengths.

In order to find the best performing network, I'm training it with many different randomly selected hyper parameters. While deep and wide architectures obviously overfit extremely, they also yield slighty better test performance than other architectures. For example, a network with 4 hidden layers with 800, 960, 1150 and 1380 units respectively results in a mean squared error of 3.28 while an architecture with only 2 hidden layers and 300/210 units results in a MSE of 3.32. How can this be explained? I don't feel like using an overfitted network is sensible, however it does show better test performance than less overfitted networks.

People already hate inane Snapchat-like AI photo filters, but a new trick called Portrait Lighting on Apple's iPhone 8 and X might cause even more dismay. Here's how Apple VP Phil Schiller describes it: "You compose a photo, the dual cameras and the ISP sense the scene, they create a depth map, and they actually change the lighting contours over the face." At first glance, that sounds like a nice, innocent feature, but it might one day create much more consternation than puking rainbows. In the two photos on the right (above), there's distinctive shading on the model's right jaw that's simply not there on the original, no matter how much you crank the contrast (I tried). It helps contour the face better, giving it a more three-dimensional look, much as a portrait photographer would by using lights.

Frost & Sullivan's research, Disruption in Global Financial Services, 2017--Machine Learning is Imperative, provides an overview of ML market dynamics, including technology trends, drivers, and challenges for adoption. Case studies and profiles of some of the key players in the report cover Google, IBM, Orange, Swisscom, Onfido, Darktrace, Klarna, Infosys, SAP, and Rasa.ai. To access more information on this analysis, please visit: https://goo.gl/4CtAwr "The biggest advantage of ML solutions is their ability to learn from every transaction and instance. Today, companies and consumers are more comfortable with hybrid services. However, the fact that machines are evolving at a rapid pace, learning continuously and using this knowledge to improve customer satisfaction and experience is the biggest differentiator," stated Digital Transformation Senior Industry Analyst Deepali Sathe.

Eyal Grayevsky has a plan to make Silicon Valley more diverse. Mya Systems, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that he cofounded in 2012, has built its strategy on a single idea: Reduce the influence of humans in recruiting. "We're taking out bias from the process," he tells me. Simon Chandler is a freelance journalist covering tech, politics, and music. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.