Translation apps are getting better, but they're still not perfect, particularly for minority languages. Can artificial intelligence and deep neural networks help iron out the glitches? During the World Cup in Russia this summer there was a dramatic spike in the use of Google Translate, the company says, as fans tried to strike up conversations with their hosts and fellow fans from around the world. The words for "stadium" and "beer" were in particularly high demand. These days the traditional phrasebook is on the way out.

Not to be outdone by Amazon's deluge of hardware announcements last week, set-top box maker Roku is readying two new, low-cost streaming video boxes. Along with the new hardware, Roku is going to work with Google Assistant voice control to make it easier for users to find all the streaming content available for bingeing. Roku said in a briefing last week that it's adding two new 4K streaming boxes: the Roku Premiere and Roku Premiere . These boxes have a similar form factor to Roku's Express line; they're tiny pieces of hardware, much smaller than the remote they ship with, and are so lightweight they come with a strip of tape so you can stick them to your entertainment console. But these tiny Rokus stream 4K HDR video, pack quad-core processors, and come with updated firmware that the company says contributes to a smoother streaming experience.

Octopai, the leader in metadata management automation for BI, has been recognized in Gartner's September 2018 "Cool Vendors in Data Science and Machine Learning" report by analysts Peter Krensky, Svetlana Sicular, Jim Hare, Erick Brethenoux and Austin Kronz, as one of 5 Cool Vendors According to Gartner, "Data and analytics leaders should engage with vendors in areas such as data management, unstructured data analysis and model operationalization." "We are very honored to be named a Gartner Cool Vendor for 2018," said Amnon Drori, Co-founder and CEO of Octopai. "The growing complexity of data management environments has created a need for modern and disruptive metadata management automation tools. We believe Octopai's inclusion in the Gartner report highlights this need." According to the report, "as citizen data science, enabled by augmented analytics, dramatically increases the volume of models created, discipline in data management and operationalization becomes even more critical."

In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was one of those being shown around the Palo Alto, California campus. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious," Larry Page said of the encounter. "He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too." "We both found each other obnoxious," said Sergey Brin.

Scientists have unveiled a quadrupedal robot that can open doors, ride an elevator and, in perhaps one of the creepiest scenarios, move uninterrupted after being pushed over by a human. Called the'ANYmal,' the device is described as an autonomous robot that can navigate nearly any terrain, including ones deemed unsafe for human entry. Anymal's robotic limbs allow it to move at a pace that's comparable to that of a human and it can carry a payload of up to 22lbs. It was developed by Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland and has been shown in several videos completing various tasks. The latest clip shows Anymal using an articulated arm to turn a door handle, then push the door open with ease.

Fortnite Season 6 is almost here, with Epic Games formally announcing that the latest version of the battle royale phenomenon will launch on 27 September. A teaser image showing a robotic lama was published by the official social media channels of Fortnite's developer on Monday, though it is not clear what this signifies. A short message accompanied the image: "All great parties need a DJ. 3 days to Season 6." Players of the game can expect new skins, challenges and updates to the map, which has already begun to change after the mysterious purple cube rolled into Loot Lake last week. After a month of rolling periodically around the terrain, leaving scorch patterns – or'runes – on the ground, the giant cube reached its final destination. When it reached the lake, it transformed the surface into a purple trampoline.

Last year's iPhone X was a groundbreaking device, in part due to the removal of what made the iPhone so iconic. Gone was the fingerprint-scanning home button, and in its place was an aesthetically controversial "notch" to make room for the Face ID security (and Animoji) functionality. It was also groundbreaking in terms of price. It may have debuted alongside the $699-and-up iPhone 8, but it was the first thousand-dollar smartphone from Apple, a price a surprisingly high number of people were able to stomach for the sake of having the coolest phone on the block. With the new iPhone XS and XS Max, Apple is trying to tell us something: like it or not, this is the future of the iPhone.

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A West Virginia teenager has created a rapping A.I. bot that self-generates bars using Kanye West lyrics, Quartz reports. Robbie Barrat, 17, was debating whether artificial intelligence could be taught to perform tasks better than humans in his high school's programming club. Using open-source code, Barrat programmed the A.I. with 6,000 Kanye lines and finished the project in a week to show his peers at the next club meeting. "Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word-by-word," Barrat said. The bot can also incorporate pauses for rhythm and effect.

Deep learning doesn't take a huge amount of time or computational resources. Nor does it require highly complex code, and in some cases not even a large amount of training data. Curated best practices are now available as libraries that make it easy to plug in and write your own neural network architectures using a minimal amount of code to achieve more than 90% prediction accuracies. The two most popular deep learning libraries are: (1) pytorch created by Facebook (we will be using fastai today, which is built on top of pytorch) and (2) the keras-tensorflow framework created by Google. We will build an image classifier using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to predict if a given image is that of Drogon or Vicerion (any Game of Thrones fans here in the house?