Artificial intelligence finds T. rex couldn't run A popular YouTube artist has an unusual collaborator on her new album -- artificial intelligence. Pop artist Taryn Southern, who appeared on American Idol in 2004, created the lyrics and melodies for "I AM AI" but left most of the other work to software programs. The album's first song "Break Free," which was released on Monday, was developed with the help of startup Amper Music. Amper is one of several AI music services Southern is working with on the album, which will debut later this year. Southern has only basic piano skills, so she turned to the program to deliver the instrumental part of the song.

Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, video games were often talked about as a looming threat to cinema. The advent of CD-Rom technology promoted the medium's blocksome characters from avatars to actors, complete with lines of dialogue written by professional scriptwriters and spoken by performers loaned from TV and film. Soaring orchestral soundtracks backed three-act structures and, as games popped from 2D to 3D, the composition of scenes, lighting and lines of sight became concerns for digital directors as well as film. At some point the trajectory shifted. Games still borrow filmic techniques, but the truly cinematic video game – that which seeks to mimic the characterisation, structure and run-time of a blockbuster movie – is endangered, squeezed out by world-conquering, team-based eSports on one side and, on the other, everlasting online worlds where the game's geography expands to match the player's wanderlust. Naughty Dog remains one of the few purveyors of the filmic game.

Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. In the movie "2001" I found the scariest moment was when astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole met in the EVA pod to discuss the artificially intelligent HAL 9000 computer's behavior -- and HAL reads their lips. In the paper Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild, researchers Joon Son Chung, of Oxford University, Andrew Senior, Oriol Vinyals, and Andrew Zisserman, of Google, tested an algorithm that bested professional human lip readers. Soon, surveillance videos may not only show your actions, but the content of your speech.

It used to be that the term "automation" meant robotic arms in factories doing repetitive tasks -- fastening one part to another, drilling a screw, folding a piece of material. These days, the word means a lot more. AI means automation beyond the physical. It means automation of the tasks that previously took a living brain to complete -- things like conversation, data analysis, even driving. And ultimately, AI isn't anything new; computer scientists have been discussing and building it for decades now.

I have implemented backprop before, but never quite understood it. After much hard work I finally found out how to derive the backprop equations, in a way that I could understand. Wanted to share my approach.

It is Saturday, Sept. 2. Here's what you don't want to miss this weekend: Democratic civil war: At a time when the Democratic base is more restive than it has been in decades, Sen. Dianne Feinstein ignited a firestorm earlier this week when she refused to back the impeachment of President Trump and instead called for "patience" over his presidency. Her statements could become an albatross because of the state's shifting demographics and political leanings, as the 84-year-old decides whether to seek a sixth term. New mission: After six months in an immigrant detention facility, the taquero whose daughter recorded his arrest as he took her to school has walked out as an activist. L.A.'s identity: So much of Los Angeles' dark pop culture identity was formed by the classic sci-fi movie "Blade Runner." The director of the reboot says his movie will be distinct from the original.

Artificial intelligence is the single most-hyped trend of 2017. If you're lived through big data and digital transformation, you may be skeptical that something else will come around next year, too. AI is really a bigger deal than what has come before and it's hard to believe that it will be just another fad. Amazon Echo has established a foothold in over 10 million U.S. households (and is catching up to Siri's 41.4 million users.) Do you really think that next year all of those users are going to put their Echos in storage?

I was stuck up with a problem of multi class classification on which I am bound to use an evolutionary algorithm. As far as I know these are optimization algorithms. I could find out that genetic algorithms have been used to evolve a set of weights/rules for classification models. Is there a way in which I can involve EAs in the classification process?

One of Apple's greatest strengths is timing. The company that's hailed for innovation does not often invent things first -- it didn't create the first personal computer, the first digital music player or the first smartphone. Instead, Apple reinvents, slipping in and producing something more original than what we used to use. On paper, Apple is aiming to pull the same trick with a device called HomePod. The $349 gadget -- which Apple unveiled on Monday at its annual developer conference and will begin shipping in December -- is inspired by the Amazon Echo, the smart speaker that houses Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, and that seemed like a joke until many people (including yours truly) suddenly began to love it.

The "one-time-only" boxing match between a 40-year-old who retired two years ago and an Irishman making his pro debut in the sport is positioned to become the greatest-selling pay-per-view fight of all time Friday. Showtime Executive Vice President Stephen Espinoza said "it's too early to declare a hard number" but Saturday's Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Conor McGregor fight is "tracking in the mid-to-high 4 million pay-per view buys." "If we don't reach the record, we're going to be very, very close," and "we consider it a massive success." "It was an exciting, entertaining fight and there was massive interest," in it, Espinoza told The Times, crediting strong digital sales to boost the overall domestic sales. The bout is also expected to surpass the $600 million generated in total revenue by Mayweather's less-entertaining unanimous-decision triumph over seven-division champion Manny Pacquiao, with final pay-per-view numbers expected by next week.