On August 31, 2012, four Amazon engineers filed the fundamental patent for what ultimately became Alexa, an artificial--intelligence system designed to engage with one of the world's biggest and most tangled data sets: human speech. The engineers needed just 11 words and a simple diagram to describe how it would work. A male user in a quiet room says: "Please play'Let It Be,' by the Beatles." A small tabletop machine replies: "No problem, John," and begins playing the requested song. From that modest start, voice-based AI for the home has become a big business for Amazon and, increasingly, a strategic battleground with its technology rivals. Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are each putting thousands of researchers and business specialists to work trying to create irresistible versions of easy-to-use devices that we can talk with. "Until now, all of us have bent to accommodate tech, in terms of typing, tapping, or swiping.

Armies of content moderators are working to scrub social networks of the worst content humanity has to offer -- violence, gore, hardcore sexual imagery -- and they can't keep up. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine's Day.

Drivers are avoiding parking spots that require payment by phone as cash remains a more popular way to pay, according to the AA. The motoring organisation's survey of 16,000 members suggests seven out of 10 would look for parking elsewhere rather than use the "pay by phone" meters. The AA says people are put off by administration fees and voice-controlled phone payment systems. But councils said that paying by phone was a quick and convenient option. Nearly eight in 10 pensioners who responded to the AA survey said they would drive on rather than use them, the same proportion as drivers on low incomes.

Google Home doesn't have a huge range of on-demand music services on offer (Google's services and Spotify are your biggest choices), but you can add one to the list today. Deezer has launched Home support for its streaming music service, giving listeners in several countries a hands-free music source if they're not fans of the larger providers. The stand-out is voice control over Deezer's semi-automatic Flow playlist -- you can tell Home to "play your Flow" and get a highly personalized playlist with very little effort. Not surprisingly, Deezer is catering to its core European audience first: it's starting today with support in France and Germany, while the US, UK, Australia and Canada are due later in 2017. You probably won't rush to sign up for Deezer if you weren't already a member, but look at it this way: few music services outside of the majors work with voice-guided speakers, so this could be a reason to stick to Deezer if you were thinking of jumping ship.

Have you ever felt guilty about leaving your dog home alone, wishing there was a way to calm it? Amazon's Audible may have the answer - a good book. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan has teamed up with the firm to create audiobooks for dogs, which use human voices to tell stories to dogs when nobody is at home, keeping then company. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan (pictured) teamed up with audible to conduct their own study to see what impact audiobooks have on dogs when their owners are away. By using a speaker along with one of the audiobooks, users can play one of a range of audible's audiobooks, with recommended titles including: According to a demonstration video by Millan, having to be away from our dogs can be a stressful situation, joined by guilt and shame for having to be away from our pets for long periods of time, for example when going to work.

Online review communities are dynamic as users join and leave, adopt new vocabulary, and adapt to evolving trends. Recent work has shown that recommender systems benefit from explicit consideration of user experience. However, prior work assumes a fixed number of discrete experience levels, whereas in reality users gain experience and mature continuously over time. This paper presents a new model that captures the continuous evolution of user experience, and the resulting language model in reviews and other posts. Our model is unsupervised and combines principles of Geometric Brownian Motion, Brownian Motion, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to trace a smooth temporal progression of user experience and language model respectively. We develop practical algorithms for estimating the model parameters from data and for inference with our model (e.g., to recommend items). Extensive experiments with five real-world datasets show that our model not only fits data better than discrete-model baselines, but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods for predicting item ratings.

Spotify recently hit 60 million paid subscribers, up from 50 million subscribers in March. Until today, however, such subscribers, and for that matter listeners on freebie accounts, could not access the popular streaming music service on Microsoft's Xbox One video game console. That changes with Tuesday's official announcement that Spotify is coming to the Xbox One in 34 global markets. Spotify is a latecomer to Microsoft's console, considering that the service has been available on Sony's rival PlayStation consoles since March of 2015. There won't be much difference, the company says, in the Spotify experience on the PS3 and PS4 compared to the experience on Xbox One.

Even though I did not follow his older courses, they seem really appreciated, at least on this subreddit. I hope these new ones will set an even higher standard. That way, newcomers may share an identical set of notations, principles and methodologies so we can all focus on other tasks, such as visualization. You will practice all these ideas in Python and in TensorFlow. What do you guys think of this choice?

Artist and machine learning engineer Terence Broad's Auto-Encoding Blade Runner is the project Philip K. Dick would have made if he were a scientist. In his presentation at SIGGRAPH 2017, a computer graphics and animation conference, Broad detailed how he trained a Convolutional Autoencoder--a type of neural network--to recognize patterns of data in Blade Runner and then reconstruct it, scene by scene. What results is an eerily-accurate full-length film that was so convincing that Warner Bros. issued a DMCA takedown notice to Vimeo when Broad first uploaded the footage in 2016. The real question behind Broad's Blade Runner parallels the themes of Philip K Dick's legendary novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Where does one draw the line between human and machine, the real and the seemingly real? "I think the thing to understand about neural networks is that we don't really know how they work," Ruth West, SIGGRAPH's chair of art papers, told me in an interview. "They're black boxes, and they make these leaps that are kind of like the leaps we make internally.

Imagine that tomorrow, some smart kid invented a technology that let people or physical goods pass through walls, and posted instructions for how to build it cheaply from common household materials. Lots of industries would probably become more productive. Being able to walk through walls instead of being forced to use doors would make it easier to navigate offices, move goods in and out of warehouses and accomplish any number of mundane tasks. That would give the economy a boost. But the negative might well outweigh the positive.