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Here's How Disney is Implementing Artificial Intelligence

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DIS is known for its box office hits: Beauty and the Beast, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Captain America: Civil War, just to name a few. As one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world, Disney is looking to better understand its moviegoing audience so that its upcoming movie line-up can continue to be moneymakers and crowd pleasers. Disney hopes to do this through artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology, using deep learning techniques to track the facial expressions of an audience watching a movie in order to gauge any emotional reaction to it. Called "factorized variational autoencoders," or FVAEs, the researchers said the technology works so well that after observing an audience member's face for just 10 minutes, it can predict how the person will react to the rest of the movie. The FVAEs go on to then recognize many facial expressions from movie viewers on their own, like smiles and laughter, and can make connections between different viewers to see if a particular movie is getting a wanted reaction at the right place and time.


How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music - Issue 50: Emergence

Nautilus

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend's kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to be able to turn it on and have it spit out not just any goofy little algorithmic tune but beautiful, compelling, mysterious music; something I'd be proud to have written myself. The kitchen window was open, and as I listened to the sounds of children playing in the courtyard below, I thought about how the melodies of their voices made serendipitous counterpoint with the songs of nearby birds and the intermittent drone of traffic on the rue d'Alésia. In response to these daydreams, I was making a few tweaks to my software--a chaotic, seat-of-the-pants affair that betrayed my intuitive, self-taught approach to programming--when I saw that Bill Seaman had just uploaded a new batch of audio files to our shared Dropbox folder. I had been collaborating with Bill, a media artist, on various aspects of computational creativity over the past few years. I loaded Bill's folder of sound files along with some of my own into the software and set it rolling. I was thrilled and astonished.


Apple quietly kills the iPod Nano and Shuffle

The Independent - Tech

Apple has killed the iPod Nano and Shuffle. The two iconic music players have been quietly removed from the Apple Store, signalling that they join the company's many other dead but much loved products. The line is now gradually diminishing – leaving only the iPod Touch left. That product, which is like a slimmed down iPhone without the phone, has been updated. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.


Gucci's latest fashion is a retro sci-fi mashup

Engadget

While some designers look to the future of fashion and tech, Gucci is going back to what 1960s and '70s Hollywood thought the future would be. For its Gucci and Beyond Winter Instagram campaign, the fashion house showed off some colorful, kaleidoscopic fashions on a Star Trek bridge and transporter room, with Forbidden Planet's robot thrown in for good measure. Chanel had its own spin on tech recently, with robot fashion models in a faux data center and a smoke-spewing rocket ship at Paris Fashion Week. However, Gucci designer Alessandro Michele was apparently going for both futuristic and vintage, so the wild colors are married with mixed patterns, embroidery and metallic accents. The video and Instagram shots were filmed by fashion photographer and director Glen Luchford on what we imagine were some very weird and expensive sets.


Funny Or Die puts you inside a robot racing toward obsolescence

Engadget

A young boy named Dennis has just received the birthday present of his dreams. It's you -- a Japanese robot that can repeat words, although for the most part you just watch silently. That's the premise of Felix & Paul Studios' 40-minute-long VR comedic feature for Funny Or Die called Miyubi, which launches in the Oculus store today. Through events happening to a family over the course of a year, it tells a bleak story of the futility of trying to outrace obsolescence. The harrowing message hits especially hard because of how effectively the show's creators used the medium, forcing you to witness times changing around you.


10 guilty pleasure books you need to put on your summer reading list

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

As a kid, I remember thinking about how smart adults are. I can't wait to be an adult! They are all super smart and know about things like the stock market, catching the right bus, and, like, the government and stuff! Probably the worst part about becoming an adult was realizing that there was no Matrix-style download for Adulting 101 once I turned 18. The stock market, public transportation, and the government are still mysterious things that loom large in my mind.


Burundi Robotics Team Members Told Parents They Wouldn't Return Home

International Business Times

A clearer picture has emerged of what may have happened to the young members of Burundi's robotics team who vanished last week. The team's six teenage members disappeared after a robotics competition in Washington, D.C. -- but recent reports revealed their parents may have known of their plan not to return home. The principal of Iteletique High School, where two of the students were enrolled, said the teens told their parents of their plans in advance. The parents themselves have not yet made any public statements regarding the disappearances. "Talking with parents, they told us that once the kids arrived there, they told them they may not come back," the principal, Esperance Niyonzima, told VOA's Central Africa news service Thursday.


What Billy Joel Can Teach Us About AI

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At first blush, the aging pop star Billy Joel wouldn't seem to have much to tell us about automation and the future of work. His main contribution to forecasting was the dystopian "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)," a 1976 song that ends with the island of Manhattan being sunk at sea. (Spoiler: It's 2017 and the island of Manhattan is very much buoyant. However, in sifting through the constant barrage of headlines, reports, projections, and warnings about robots and automation, the hook of another Billy Joel song, "Summer, Highland Falls," comes to mind: "It's either sadness or euphoria." Those seem to be the polar reactions to the advent of the next wave of disruptive technology. Automation and artificial intelligence, we are told, have the capacity to replace all manner of jobs quite soon. And the result will likely be sadness on a massive scale for many workers.


Future Of IoT, Machine Learning, And Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

As the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) grow and expand, the way companies and industries doing business and the way customer responds to the market have been changing swiftly. The studies and forecasts say that IoT, AI, and Machine Learning will be constantly present and a vital part in our lives. The way industries and customer-oriented companies are doing business using Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), they have come to the conclusion that AI and IoT will design and define the future and will create a trend of success or failure. Healthcare is the widest domain that allows the intervention of IoT and AI in depth. Also, it is the fastest domain to adopt the Internet of Things.


Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language • r/artificial

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We offer an opportunity for companies and individuals working on interesting problems in AI to introduce their work to the community through the IAMA. Please contact /u/dejormo for more information. We would love to hear from you!