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Hover 2 foldable drone can look for obstacles as it flies itself
The Hover Camera Passport foldable drone made quite the impression when it first launched a little over two years ago, and then it received a major update in April last year, which added a smartphone-free mode that automatically tracks and records its owner. Save for the rumored Snap acquisition deal (which Zero Zero Robotics still denies today), we had barely heard from the drone maker since then, but today it's back with a surprise announcement: The launch of its second selfie drone, Hover 2. As you'd expect, the Hover 2 has inherited all the best bits of the Passport, especially its small foldable form factor, sturdy carbon fibre cage enclosure, Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (model not specified but it's "four times more powerful than" before), 4K 30fps video capture, face tracking and body tracking. The two drones look similar from afar, though the newer model benefits from more than double the original flight time, jumping from a mere 10 minutes to 19 minutes (but maximum flight time is 23 minutes; more on that later). This may explain the heavier weight of 490 grams or about 1.1 pounds -- almost twice as much as before. When switched on, you'll notice a new major feature on the Hover 2: Its swiveling "Optical Radar" that pops out of the top of the body.
These awful AI song lyrics show us how hard language is for machines
Among creative applications for algorithms, writing lyrics and poetry has proved particularly challenging. The art of producing lyrics with a machine also differs greatly from other tasks in natural-language processing. The ultimate goal is to be creative rather than accurate, which can have a difficult-to-pin-down definition. That didn't stop two researchers at Google from trying to create an automated lyric-generation machine. They approached the task with two separate machine-learning models.
State of AI in the Enterprise, 2nd Edition
FOR the second straight year, Deloitte surveyed executives in the US knowledgeable about cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence,1 representing companies that are testing and implementing them today. We found that these early adopters2 remain bullish on cognitive technologies' value. As in last year's survey, the level of support for AI is truly extraordinary. These findings illustrate that cognitive technologies hold enticing promise, some of which is being fulfilled today. However, AI technologies may deliver their best returns when companies balance excitement over their potential with the ability to execute. A year later, and the thrill isn't gone. In Deloitte's 2017 cognitive survey, we were struck by early adopters' enthusiasm for cognitive technologies.4 That excitement owed much to the returns they said cognitive technologies were generating: 83 percent stated they were seeing either "moderate" or "substantial" benefits. Respondents also said they expected that cognitive technologies would change both their companies and their industries rapidly. In 2018, respondents remain enthusiastic about the value cognitive technologies bring. Their companies are investing in foundational cognitive capabilities, and using them with more skill. Thirty-seven percent of respondents say their companies have invested US$5 million or more in cognitive technologies. Another reason is that companies have more ways to acquire cognitive capabilities, and they are taking advantage.
Almost Zero-Resource ASR-free Keyword Spotting using Multilingual Bottleneck Features and Correspondence Autoencoders
Menon, Raghav, Kamper, Herman, Quinn, John, Niesler, Thomas
We compare features for dynamic time warping based keyword spotting in an almost zero-resource setting. The objective is to support United Nations (UN) humanitarian relief efforts in parts of Africa with severely under-resourced languages. As supervised resource, we restrict ourselves to an easily-compiled small set of isolated keywords. For feature extraction, we integrate a multilingual bottleneck feature extractor (BNF), trained on well-resourced out-of-domain languages, with a correspondence autoencoder (CAE), trained on extremely sparse in-domain data. We find that, on their own, BNFs and CAE features achieve more than 2% absolute performance improvement over baseline MFCCs. However, by using BNFs as input to the CAE, even better performance is achieved, with an 11% absolute improvement in ROC AUC over MFCCs and twice as many top-10 retrievals. We conclude that integrating BNFs with the CAE allows both large out-of-domain and sparse in-domain resources to be exploited for improved ASR-free keyword spotting.
Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset
Hawthorne, Curtis, Stasyuk, Andriy, Roberts, Adam, Simon, Ian, Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna, Dieleman, Sander, Elsen, Erich, Engel, Jesse, Eck, Douglas
Generating musical audio directly with neural networks is notoriously difficult because it requires coherently modeling structure at many different timescales. Fortunately, most music is also highly structured and can be represented as discrete note events played on musical instruments. Herein, we show that by using notes as an intermediate representation, we can train a suite of models capable of transcribing, composing, and synthesizing audio waveforms with coherent musical structure on timescales spanning six orders of magnitude ( 0.1 ms to 100 s), a process we call Wave2Midi2Wave. This large advance in the state of the art is enabled by our release of the new MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous TRacks and Organization) dataset, composed of over 172 hours of virtuosic piano performances captured with fine alignment ( 3 ms) between note labels and audio waveforms. The networks and the dataset together present a promising approach toward creating new expressive and interpretable neural models of music. Since the beginning of the recent wave of deep learning research, there have been many attempts to create generative models of expressive musical audio de novo. These models would ideally generate audio that is both musically and sonically realistic to the point of being indistinguishable to a listener from music composed and performed by humans. However, modeling music has proven extremely difficult due to dependencies across the wide range of timescales that give rise to the characteristics of pitch and timbre (short-term) as well as those of rhythm (medium-term) and song structure (long-term). On the other hand, much of music has a large hierarchy of discrete structure embedded in its generative process: a composer creates songs, sections, and notes, and a performer realizes those notes with discrete events on their instrument, creating sound.
Melodic Phrase Segmentation By Deep Neural Networks
Guan, Yixing, Zhao, Jinyu, Qiu, Yiqin, Zhang, Zheng, Xia, Gus
Automated melodic phrase detection and segmentation is a classical task in content-based music information retrieval and also the key towards automated music structure analysis. However, traditional methods still cannot satisfy practical requirements. In this paper, we explore and adapt various neural network architectures to see if they can be generalized to work with the symbolic representation of music and produce satisfactory melodic phrase segmentation. The main issue of applying deep-learning methods to phrase detection is the sparse labeling problem of training sets. We proposed two tailored label engineering with corresponding training techniques for different neural networks in order to make decisions at a sequential level. Experiment results show that the CNN-CRF architecture performs the best, being able to offer finer segmentation and faster to train, while CNN, Bi-LSTM-CNN and Bi-LSTM-CRF are acceptable alternatives.
The 3 Ways That Artificial Intelligence Will Change Content Marketing
In many ways, artificial intelligence (AI) is already influencing digital marketing in general, and content marketing in particular. But the truth is, there is so much more to come – so many more changes and improvements that AI will surely bring to content marketing. In this blog post, I'm going to explore some of these changes in order to try to understand what the future holds – read on to discover the 3 ways that artificial intelligence will change content marketing. Before I can discuss the effects of artificial intelligence – also known as AI, machine intelligence and in some cases, machine learning - on content marketing, it's important to first understand what exactly artificial intelligence is. So, what is AI, exactly? Techopedia defines it as "an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans.
R.I.P. HAL: Douglas Rain, Voice Of Computer In '2001,' Dies At 90
Douglas Rain, a Shakespeare actor who provided the eerie, calmly homicidal voice of HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at the age of 90. The Canadian actor died Sunday morning, according to the Stratford Festival, where Rain spent 32 seasons acting in such roles such as Othello's Iago and Twelfth Night's Malvolio. He was also a founding member of the company. The Winnipeg-born actor had dozens of theater, film and television credits. However, Rain's biggest mark on pop culture was less Shakespearean, but perhaps just as much a classic: as 2001's HAL 9000, a sentient, rogue computer in a film written in collaboration with science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and widely regarded as Kubrick's masterpiece.
Samsung foldable phone: Price and release date revealed in leak
The name, price and release date of Samsung's mysterious foldable smartphone have finally been revealed, according to a South Korean news agency. Samsung teased the device at its annual developer conference last week, saying it will serve as the "foundation of the smartphone of tomorrow" – though few details about the phone were actually revealed. The so-called Galaxy F will be released in March 2019 and is expected to cost 2 million won (£1,370), the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency reported. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. 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 The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.
LSE Research Prof. Andrew Murray The Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
HAL 9000 will soon no longer be science fiction: sentient machines will quickly be with us. As "smart agents" make decisions for human actors a number of important legal issues will emerge. In this short film, LSE Professor Andrew Murray looks at how AI will fundamentally alter our understanding of what the law is and what it can achieve. These themes will be the focus of Professor Murray's forthcoming book - The Objective Self: Identity and Law in the Digital Society.