Back in July 2015, Amazon announced a Chromecast-like feature for its own Fire TV streaming box and Fire TV Stick. The feature was called Amazon Fling, and it would allow existing phone and tablet apps to play media on a nearby television, just like Chromecast can. But over the last two years, that effort has languished. I can't find a single high-profile streaming service that supports Fling, and when I asked several streaming companies about it, their responses generally ranged from no comment to no interest. Amazon hasn't put much weight behind Fling, either.

Understanding how today's AI works might seem overwhelming, but it really boils down to two concepts you probably have heard of before: "machine learning" and "deep learning". Neither are brand new ideas, but the way they're used seems to constantly evolve. Machine learning and deep learning are how Netflix knows what you might want to watch next, or how Facebook can recognize your friends' face in a photo, or how a support agent can figure out if you'll be satisfied with your customer service. So what are these buzzwords that still dominate the conversations about AI, and how exactly are they different? And what do they mean for customer service? "Algorithms that parse data, learn from that data, and then apply what they've learned to make informed decisions" An easy example is an on-demand music streaming service.

It's hard to open a newspaper these days without encountering an article on the arrival of artificial intelligence. Predictions about the potential of this new technology are everywhere. Media hype aside, real evidence shows that artificial intelligence (AI) already drives a major shift in the global economy. You now use it in your day-to-day life, as you look to Netflix to recommend your next binge or ask Alexa to play music in your home. And the benefits of AI are driving the technologies into every corner of the global economy. Look, for example, at the number of times the largest U.S. companies mention artificial intelligence in their 10-K filings.

Generating adversarial examples is a critical step for evaluating and improving the robustness of learning machines. So far, most existing methods only work for classification and are not designed to alter the true performance measure of the problem at hand. We introduce a novel flexible approach named Houdini for generating adversarial examples specifically tailored for the final performance measure of the task considered, be it combinatorial and non-decomposable. We successfully apply Houdini to a range of applications such as speech recognition, pose estimation and semantic segmentation. In all cases, the attacks based on Houdini achieve higher success rate than those based on the traditional surrogates used to train the models while using a less perceptible adversarial perturbation.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the best action movies of all time. It's also consistently been a great piece of reference material for home theater geeks who like showing off just what their fancy audio and video gear is capable of. Well, this fall writer-director James Cameron's classic will be released on UHD Blu-ray. With it comes HDR video, a new 4K restoration and, if you feel like dropping $175, a life-size T-800 endoskeleton arm replete with Cameron's signature. Yep, like the one John and Sarah Connor tossed into a vat of molten steel at the movie's end.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. If you love new technology like we do, this scenario might sound familiar: You've found the perfect tech gift for your parents or grandparents, but you're worried they might not use it if it's too complicated to learn. You know they would love the functionality, but how do you make sure it's as easy to use as possible? It's a common dilemma, and often, it comes down to setting up the device in a way that's as straightforward as possible.

Facebook is due to launch a subscription-based news product, it has been reported. The social media giant's news partnerships head Campbell Brown announced the plans at a conference in New York. The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription, according to a TheStreet report. The idea for a paywall is based on premium and metered plans and has been in the works for a while, TheStreet said, citing comments by Mr Brown at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit. The company is widely seen as a threat to publishers as it hoovers up digital advertising revenue.

Originally posted to LinkedIn Pulse by Chris Bradford, Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at FiberLight, LLC. According to a report from Markets and Markets, the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) space is expected to surge to $16 billion over the next five years, growing at a CAGR of nearly 63 percent from 2016 to 2022. AI is the development of smart systems that can perform tasks which normally require human intelligence. Machine and deep learning are subsets of AI that mimic activities in neural networks of the brain where thinking occurs. Deep learning software can be programmed to recognize patterns in the digital representations of sounds, images and other data.

Today in Entertainment: 'Despacito' is now the most-streamed song ever; 'Teen Wolf' might be howling a different tune on MTV Keegan-Michael Key resurrects Luther, Obama's'anger translator,' for Stephen Colbert Madonna blocks auction of Tupac Shakur letter, 'personally worn' panties Nothing slow about it: 'Despacito' is now the most-streamed song ever'Teen Wolf' might be howling a different tune on MTV Los Angeles Times' Carolina A. Miranda wins Rabkin Prize for arts writers Keegan-Michael Key resurrects Luther, Obama's'anger translator,' for Stephen Colbert Nothing slow about it: 'Despacito' is now the most-streamed song ever'Teen Wolf' might be howling a different tune on MTV Fans of director Guillermo del Toro have learned to expect the unexpected. Over the course of his career, the filmmaker has put his unique stamp on everything from vampires ("Cronos") to superheroes ("Hellboy") to giant robots ("Pacific Rim") to gothic horror ("Crimson Peak"). The just-released first trailer for del Toro's latest film, "The Shape of Water," finds him back in the realm of dark, unsettling fairy tales, a la his 2006 film, "Pan's Labyrinth" -- this time with a suitably twisted romantic spin. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the film centers on a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins) at a top-secret government laboratory who develops a relationship with an aquatic humanoid creature (Doug Jones) -- the last of his species -- who is being held in a tank and subjected to experiments. "The Shape of Water," which co-stars Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon and Richard Jenkins, hits theaters Dec. 8.

The first voice you hear on the recording is mine. "Here we are," I say. My tone is cheerful, but a catch in my throat betrays how nervous I am. "Esquire," a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word--delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity--immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents' bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It's the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I'd driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it's May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I am holding a digital audio recorder. Sensing that I don't quite know how to proceed, my dad hands me a piece of notepaper marked with a skeletal outline in his handwriting. It consists of just a few broad headings: "Family History." "So … do you want to take one of these cat egories and dive into it?" "I want to dive in," he says confidently. "Well, in the first place, my mother was born in the village of Kehries--K-e-h-r-i-e-s--on the Greek island of Evia …" With that, the session is under way. We are sitting here, doing this, because my father has recently been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The disease has metastasized widely throughout his body, including his bones, liver, and brain. It is going to kill him, probably in a matter of months. So now my father is telling the story of his life. This will be the first of more than a dozen sessions, each lasting an hour or more. As my audio recorder runs, he describes how he used to explore caves when he was growing up; how he took a job during college loading ice blocks into railroad boxcars.