As deep learning is gaining in popularity, creative applications are gaining traction as well. Looking at music generation through deep learning, new algorithms and songs are popping up on a weekly basis. In this post we will go over six major players in the field, and point out some difficult challenges these systems still face. GitHub links are provided for those who are interested in the technical details (or if you're looking to generate some music of your own). Magenta is Google's open source deep learning music project.

AI is slowly seeping into our lives in profound ways. The way we think about AI is coloured by popular culture and science fiction. Many feel that if they could make that science fiction real then we wouldn't have to worry about messy kinds of stuff in society. My concern is not about the singularity that experts like Ray Kurzweil have talked about in his book Singularity Is Near nor Hollywood movies like Transcendence, which paint a dystopian view of a future transformed by AI. The human brain is a remarkable piece of engineering and fears that AI might take over human brain is not imminent.

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Apple's new HomePod speaker, coming at the end of the year, has deep rich sound that blows the Amazon Echo and Google Home out of the water. Apple developers debuted their new home device which features Siri and Apple Music at the WWDC Conference in San Francisco, California. After spending time listening to several songs on the HomePod here at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference here, I, was wowed. But that doesn't mean Apple will have an easy time of it. Sales of high-end audio have never been a consumer electronics topper.

On Monday, Apple previewed a Siri watch face on Apple Watch to offer reminders and other tasks people might be looking for. On the phone, Apple wants its digital assistant to be more helpful in navigating your digital life. If someone texts you about owing money, for instance, it will ask if you want to pay from your Apple Pay account.

In one of its most jam-packed events ever, Apple made a slew of announcements during its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. Some involved incremental changes to hardware and software, while others provided a glimpse at where Apple believes the future of computing is headed. As per usual, Apple dedicated a significant portion of its WWDC keynote to the new software features coming to the iPhone and iPad. In iOS 11, iPhone owners will be getting a new Venmo-style option for sending money to friends via Apple Pay, a redesigned control center, a refreshed Apple Music app with more social features, a new Siri with a natural-sounding voice, and an improved Do Not Disturb feature designed to prevent distracted driving, among other additions. Apple also announced camera improvements, including more photo effects like long exposure mode and upgrades for better low-light photography.

Apple introduced the HomePod, its rival to Amazon's Echo, at the 2017 WWDC. Apple HomePod speaker, announced at Apple's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, 2017. SAN JOSE -- Apple has set its sights on the living room, with a voice-activated $349 speaker called the HomePod that leverages personal digital-assistant Siri and stresses its functionality with core Apple services like Apple Music. The iPhone maker was expected to announce a smart speaker, a market that Amazon -- with its sleeper hit, the Echo -- and then later Google Home, powered by Assistant -- now dominate, giving them an integral place in users' lives. Such a speaker was missing from Apple's line-up, allowing rivals Amazon and Google to siphon off some of its loyal user base.

Just as we expected, Apple unveiled its Siri speaker, Homepod, today during its WWDC keynote. It's yet another category where Apple is a bit late to the party -- Amazon's Echo and Alexa ecosystem has grown steadily over the past few years, and Google has also gotten a start with its Home speaker and Assistant. Even Microsoft has a leg up with the Cortana-powered Harman Kardon Invoke speaker. Apple's pitch, as usual, is that it's delivering a more premium audio experience than the competition. The HomePod's small, vase-like case houses a four-inch woofer and seven tweeters.

Abstract: We give a simple, fast algorithm for hyperparameter optimization inspired by techniques from the analysis of Boolean functions. We focus on the high-dimensional regime where the canonical example is training a neural network with a large number of hyperparameters. The algorithm– an iterative application of compressed sensing techniques for orthogonal polynomials– requires only uniform sampling of the hyperparameters and is thus easily parallelizable. Experiments for training deep nets on Cifar-10 show that compared to state-of-the-art tools (e.g., Hyperband and Spearmint), our algorithm finds significantly improved solutions, in some cases matching what is attainable by hand-tuning. In terms of overall running time (i.e., time required to sample various settings of hyperparameters plus additional computation time), we are at least an order of magnitude faster than Hyperband and even more so compared to Bayesian Optimization.

Apple has announced iOS 11, the latest version of its mobile operating system that boasts a variety of small, yet important, improvements. Messages, for instance, now syncs across all of your devices via iCloud and gains a redesigned app drawer for better discovery. Apple Pay is now capable of letting you send cash to other people via iMessage, with the payments authenticated with Touch ID. Siri, meanwhile, gets automatic translation native to its voice interface, a feature that's been sorely lacking in previous versions Siri isn't just a voice assistant anymore, and Apple is pushing the idea that it does a similar job to Google Assistant on Android. For instance, contextual learning and predictive suggestions will be synced across all of your devices, hoping to know what you need before you do.