PISA, ITALY – Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli's voice soars to the rafters of the Tuscan theater, but all eyes are on the orchestral conductor beside him -- a robot with an apparent penchant for Verdi. The concert in the heart of Pisa is a world first, with two mechanical "arms" conducting live music at the grand finale of the first International Festival of Robotics. The Swiss-designed YuMi sweeps its baton skyward with one hand, while the other curves around in a caress that spurs on the strings as the operatic "La Donna E' Mobile" ("Woman Is Fickle") reaches its climax. But music lovers beware: YuMi can conduct set pieces, but cannot improvise, react or interact with the musicians. "It was extremely difficult to train," says Andrea Colombini, the conductor of the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra, which performed with Bocelli and soprano Maria Luigia Borsi on Tuesday.

Following months of anticipation, Apple has finally unveiled the rumored iPhone X. The $999 (£999) 'anniversary' device features an OLED edge-to-edge display, facial recognition software, and new AR emojis you can control with your face inside iMessage. As rumored, it doesn't have a home button and features a'notch' at the top. Following months of anticipation, Apple has finally unveiled the rumored iPhone X. As rumored, the $999 (£999) 'anniversary' device doesn't have a home button and features a'notch' at the top DailyMail.com

St. Louis: Amdocs, a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies, is launching Smartbot, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based bot that enables digital service providers (DSPs) to provide customer care, sales and marketing engagements to even the most discerning millennial. Amdocs Smartbot with Microsoft Cognitive Services, specifically Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service and Text Analytics API, provides leading DSPs with the ability to transform how they deliver highly personalized, self-service interactions with customers that are simple, quick and helpful. As an Amdocs commissioned global study1 that surveyed over 7,000 consumers and enterprises today revealed, bots lack the intelligence and emotional awareness to address complex consumer issues and must evolve from rules-based bots to AI smartbots. Amdocs' new Smartbot addresses this gap as it is integrated with industry domain knowledge of DSP best practices and business processes. Also, with Amdocs Smartbot's deep integration with the service provider's core information systems such as CRM, order management and product catalog, DSPs can now see a 360-degree view of the customer and understand the context of the interaction, enabling them to grow care-to-commerce revenue by making more relevant predictive care and promotional offers to customers.

This press release includes information that constitutes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about Amdocs' growth and business results in future quarters. Although we believe the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that our expectations will be obtained or that any deviations will not be material. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ from those anticipated. These risks include, but are not limited to, the effects of general economic conditions, Amdocs' ability to grow in the business markets that it serves, Amdocs' ability to successfully integrate acquired businesses, adverse effects of market competition, rapid technological shifts that may render the Company's products and services obsolete, potential loss of a major customer, our ability to develop long-term relationships with our customers, and risks associated with operating businesses in the international market. Amdocs may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future; however, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.

ST. LOUIS September 12, 2017 Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies, is launching Smartbot, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based bot that enables digital service providers (DSPs) to provide customer care, sales and marketing engagements to even the most discerning millennial. Amdocs Smartbot with Microsoft Cognitive Services, specifically Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service and Text Analytics API, provides leading DSPs with the ability to transform how they deliver highly personalized, self-service interactions with customers that are simple, quick and helpful. As an Amdocs commissioned global study1 that surveyed over 7,000 consumers and enterprises today revealed, bots lack the intelligence and emotional awareness to address complex consumer issues and must evolve from rules-based bots to AI smartbots. Amdocs' new Smartbot addresses this gap as it is integrated with industry domain knowledge of DSP best practices and business processes. Also, with Amdocs Smartbot's deep integration with the service provider's core information systems such as CRM, order management and product catalog, DSPs can now see a 360-degree view of the customer and understand the context of the interaction, enabling them to grow care-to-commerce revenue by making more relevant predictive care and promotional offers to customers.

This paper presents a Semantic Attribute Modulation (SAM) for language modeling and style variation. The semantic attribute modulation includes various document attributes, such as titles, authors, and document categories. We consider two types of attributes, (title attributes and category attributes), and a flexible attribute selection scheme by automatically scoring them via an attribute attention mechanism. The semantic attributes are embedded into the hidden semantic space as the generation inputs. With the attributes properly harnessed, our proposed SAM can generate interpretable texts with regard to the input attributes. Qualitative analysis, including word semantic analysis and attention values, shows the interpretability of SAM. On several typical text datasets, we empirically demonstrate the superiority of the Semantic Attribute Modulated language model with different combinations of document attributes. Moreover, we present a style variation for the lyric generation using SAM, which shows a strong connection between the style variation and the semantic attributes.

The current work characterizes the users of a VoD streaming space through user-personas based on a tenure timeline and temporal behavioral features in the absence of explicit user profiles. A combination of tenure timeline and temporal characteristics caters to business needs of understanding the evolution and phases of user behavior as their accounts age. The personas constructed in this work successfully represent both dominant and niche characterizations while providing insightful maturation of user behavior in the system. The two major highlights of our personas are demonstration of stability along tenure timelines on a population level, while exhibiting interesting migrations between labels on an individual granularity and clear interpretability of user labels. Finally, we show a trade-off between an indispensable trio of guarantees, relevance-scalability-interpretability by using summary information from personas in a CTR (Click through rate) predictive model. The proposed method of uncovering latent personas, consequent insights from these and application of information from personas to predictive models are broadly applicable to other streaming based products.

This year's iPhone launch event hit a rocky patch when Apple exec Craig Federighi went to demonstrate the iPhone X's facial recognition technology, Face ID, which replaces the fingerprint scanner as a security mechanism. "Unlocking it is as easy as looking at it and swiping up..." he said, waiting an agonising few seconds while the device refused to unlock. He tried a second time – again, nothing – before switching to a back-up phone. The technical hitch, which came after the 10th anniversary edition of the iPhone had been revealed with huge fanfare, caused a temporary crash in Apple's market value. The stock soon rallied, however, as analysts described this year's launch event as putting Apple in an "extraordinarily strong" position.

Unless you're quite out of touch with digital trends, you'd struggle to not have heard of the phrase Machine Learning (ML). Articles are shared online daily, software vendors and service providers have begun to offer Machine Learning as-a-service, thereby making it easier to integrate ML into your existing software products (no PhD required!). But what exactly is Machine Learning? Simply put, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, or AI. Software applications are traditionally programmed by a human.

This is an actual rule. In 2011, British photographer David Slater was photographing a troop of macaques when Naruto, a six-year-old, smiled into Slater's lens, pressed the shutter button, and captured this toothy selfie: After going viral and popping social media metrics rivaling Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar-selfie, the photo was posted on Wikipedia. Slater fired off a cease-and-desist letter, but Wikipedia refused to take down the photo because a monkey, not a human, created it. PETA jumped into the fray and sued Slater to establish Naruto's ownership of his selfie. A recent settlement – in which Slater will donate a portion of future royalties to conservation charities – mooted the Ninth Circuit appeal.