NASA has released several stunning new images of Mars captured by the InSight lander's robotic arm as it snapped a photos of its new workspace. A winter wonderland sits amid a sandy Martian surface -- at least, that's the story new images released by the European Space Agency (ESA) from the Red Planet seem to tell. The stunning photos, which reveal a 50-mile-wide crater filled with ice, were shared by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft on Thursday. The Korolev crater is located on the northern lowlands of Mars, and it's consistently covered in a blanket of ice about a mile thick, the ESA said in a recent news release. "A beautiful #winter wonderland... on #Mars!" the ESA announced in a tweet, which was shared nearly 10,000 times as of Friday afternoon.

When a person using Amazon's voice assistant in Germany requested to listen to his archive of recordings, he got much more than he was expecting. Along with receiving his own audio history captured by a home microphone, the user also gained access to 1,700 audio files from a person he did not know. Amazon sent the man a link that contained a stranger's recordings, allowing him to listen to another man speaking inside his home with a female companion, Reuters reported Thursday, citing a German trade magazine, c't. Here's which one you should pick.] "This was an unfortunate case of human error and an isolated incident," Amazon told The Washington Post in a statement Thursday.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered our daily lives with a bang. From marketing to medicine, every business and industry seems to be affected. Technology companies are competing for dominance in the race to lead the market and acquire the most innovative and promising AI businesses. You may already be using AI in everyday life, with applications such as speech recognition, virtual assistance on your smartphone, the recommendation algorithms of shopping websites and music or video streaming services, or even when you visit the doctor and he compares an X-Ray or other medical images with other medical data. And then there are the terms machine learning and deep learning, which seem to confuse many people.

Last July, photographer Reuben Wu and a crew of around 30 people hiked from the Peruvian city of Huaraz, nestled in the Cordillera Blanca region of the Andes, to the 16,000-foot-high Pastoruri glacier. The hike took around four hours and the crew arrived after sunset, finding the melting glacier lit only by a full moon. These Stitched Photos of Greenland's Icebergs Are Sew Great Wu has shot conceptual landscape photography in some of the world's most remote locations--East Java, Patagonia, Chile's Atacama Desert, Norway's Svalbard Archipelago--but this shoot, part of a mini-documentary about Wu's photography done as part of a Coors Light ad campaign, gave him the opportunity to highlight global warming by photographing a fast-receding glacier, one of the last in South America. "There were parts of the glacier where you could see evidence of pretty extreme breakdown and melting of the snow," Wu says. "Parts of the glacier no longer had the epic, jagged chunks of ice."

Depression is ranked as the largest contributor to global disability and is also a major reason for suicide. Still, many individuals suffering from forms of depression are not treated for various reasons. Previous studies have shown that depression also has an effect on language usage and that many depressed individuals use social media platforms or the internet in general to get information or discuss their problems. This paper addresses the early detection of depression using machine learning models based on messages on a social platform. In particular, a convolutional neural network based on different word embeddings is evaluated and compared to a classification based on user-level linguistic metadata. An ensemble of both approaches is shown to achieve state-of-the-art results in a current early detection task. Furthermore, the currently popular ERDE score as metric for early detection systems is examined in detail and its drawbacks in the context of shared tasks are illustrated. A slightly modified metric is proposed and compared to the original score. Finally, a new word embedding was trained on a large corpus of the same domain as the described task and is evaluated as well.

Emotional content is a crucial ingredient in user-generated videos. However, the sparsely expressed emotions in the user-generated video cause difficulties to emotions analysis in videos. In this paper, we propose a new neural approach---Bi-stream Emotion Attribution-Classification Network (BEAC-Net) to solve three related emotion analysis tasks: emotion recognition, emotion attribution and emotion-oriented summarization, in an integrated framework. BEAC-Net has two major constituents, an attribution network and a classification network. The attribution network extracts the main emotional segment that classification should focus on in order to mitigate the sparsity problem. The classification network utilizes both the extracted segment and the original video in a bi-stream architecture. We contribute a new dataset for the emotion attribution task with human-annotated ground-truth labels for emotion segments. Experiments on two video datasets demonstrate superior performance of the proposed framework and the complementary nature of the dual classification streams.

There's no denying that holiday music is somewhat formulaic. You'd think it would be easy for a computer to generate something indistinguishable from the typical carols piped through department stores this time of year. Turns out, it's not that easy. Swedish company Made by AI recently trained an AI system on 100 midi files of Christmas tunes, then tasked it with creating new songs. Made by AI is not the first group to create some lackluster AI-generated music. There was this attempt, from researchers at the University of Toronto in 2016.

A new company called Lighthouse introduced an advanced security camera that can tell the difference between a person and a pet back in 2017. It was a promising, Andy Rubin-backed project that managed to raise around $20 million. Unfortunately, it sounds like not a lot of people were willing to pay $300 for a security cam, even if it's powered by advanced AI and 3D sensing, because the company is shutting down operations. CEO Alex Teichman announced the closure on its website, where he admitted that Lighthouse didn't make enough money to keep the company going. "I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished -- delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing," he wrote.

Things are moving forward for video game focused action-comedy Free Guy. The movie, which stars Deadpool favorite Ryan Reynolds, has just signed Killing Eve's Jodie Comer, Get Out's Lil Rel and Stranger Things' Joe Keery in supporting roles. Free Guy -- set to begin shooting in April -- tells the story of a background character (Reynolds) who realizes he's living in a video game, and with the help of an avatar (Comer), must stop the game's developers from shutting down his world. Shawn Levy is attached to direct, which means he'll be stepping away from Uncharted, the long-awaited live action adaptation of the game. The movie, which is loosely based on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, has been in the works for some time, with a multiple writers and directors coming and going.

Google Assistant is everywhere, ranging from the Android smartphone in your pocket to the smart speakers and smart displays ensconced in your kitchen or living room. And that means you can control all your smart home devices without so much as turning your head. All you need to say is "Hey Google!" What do you say after that? Well, almost anything, but here are 15 essential commands you should commit to memory.