The Verge reported that the news around Ebola was wreaking havoc in Texas towns. It was spreading like wildfire on the social landscape and these were messages from sources that sounded like newspapers. This happened in 2014 and what followed were trails of fake news sending shock waves across the media and user world. As per The New York Times, just before the presidential elections in the US, fake news and memes became the tools for perpetrators to influence the outcome of elections. Fake news is rearing its ugly head time and time again.

Yuval Noah Harari's first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historian's mind-bending tour through the triumph of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity -- and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. I spoke with Harari recently for my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. To hear our whole conversation, subscribe on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) or stream it off SoundCloud. In this excerpt, which has been edited for length and clarity, Harari and I discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, whether digital consciousness is a necessary byproduct of digital intelligence, and what it will all mean for human beings. As you'll see, I'm a bit less convinced than Harari is that the computers are coming for our jobs, and that human beings are on the edge of economic uselessness.

The marketing industry is rapidly evolving. It's at a new phase where Big Data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are driving strategy development and decision making. Because conventional analytics scale at a gradual pace, marketers are beginning to utilise AI to analyse the large volume of unstructured data to improve marketing research, forecasting accuracy and campaign experiences. A research of CMOs from the US, UK, and China from companies with more than $500 million in revenue revealed that around two thirds of these think Artificial Intelligence will play a significant role in their future marketing operations. But only a third claimed to have good knowledge of how it is actually implemented.

Interest in machine learning may be at an all-time high. Per Google Trends, people are searching for machine learning nearly five times as often as five years ago. And at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where I'm presently a PhD candidate, we had over 300 students enrolled in both our graduate-level recommender systems and neural networks courses. Much of this attention is warranted. Breakthroughs in computer vision, speech recognition, and, more generally, pattern recognition in large data sets, have given machine learning substantial power to impact industry, society, and other academic disciplines.

Ubisoft's blockbuster videogame franchise Assassin's Creed might be coming to TV, says the company. Ubisoft's blockbuster videogaming franchise Assassin's Creed didn't exactly kill at the box office, but is the company going to try for another bite at the golden apple by bringing the historical adventure series to the small screen? During a Reddit AMA, franchise content chief Aymar Azaizia indicated that that was the plan. Asked if he could address rumors of a TV series, Azaizia declined to be specific but offered that, "it's like the move guys, we will take our time, to get sure we deliver something we can be proud of, but if you wander [SIC] if it's on our plan… YES." (emphasis in original). "We have been in talk[s] with great partners, and are at the very early stages of creating a TV series so it won't be anytime soon, but I would f***ing love it! He also said that while any production decisions around the show were far off, his "gut feeling" is that the company would go for live action rather than CGI animated.

The relationship between humans and robots is a tricky thing. If the latter looks too much like the former, but is still clearly a machine, people think it's creepy, even repulsive--a feeling that's become known as the "uncanny valley." Or, as is sometimes the case, the human, with "Star Wars" or "The Jetsons" as his or her reference points, is disappointed by all the things the robot can't yet do. Then, there is the matter of job insecurity--the fear of one day being replaced by a tireless, unflappable, unfailingly consistent device. Human-robot interactions can be even more complicated for one group in particular--older adults.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is one of the oldest and most well-studied problems in the field of music information retrieval. Within this challenging research field, onset detection and instrument recognition take important places in transcription systems, as they respectively help to determine exact onset times of notes and to recognize the corresponding instrument sources. The aim of this study is to explore the usefulness of multiscale scattering operators for these two tasks on plucked string instrument and piano music. After resuming the theoretical background and illustrating the key features of this sound representation method, we evaluate its performances comparatively to other classical sound representations. Using both MIDI-driven datasets with real instrument samples and real musical pieces, scattering is proved to outperform other sound representations for these AMT subtasks, putting forward its richer sound representation and invariance properties.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) consists in automatically estimating the notes in an audio recording, through three attributes: onset time, duration and pitch. Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis (PLCA) has become very popular for this task. PLCA is a spectrogram factorization method, able to model a magnitude spectrogram as a linear combination of spectral vectors from a dictionary. Such methods use the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the parameters of the acoustic model. This algorithm presents well-known inherent defaults (local convergence, initialization dependency), making EM-based systems limited in their applications to AMT, particularly in regards to the mathematical form and number of priors. To overcome such limits, we propose in this paper to employ a different estimation framework based on Particle Filtering (PF), which consists in sampling the posterior distribution over larger parameter ranges. This framework proves to be more robust in parameter estimation, more flexible and unifying in the integration of prior knowledge in the system. Note-level transcription accuracies of 61.8 $\%$ and 59.5 $\%$ were achieved on evaluation sound datasets of two different instrument repertoires, including the classical piano (from MAPS dataset) and the marovany zither, and direct comparisons to previous PLCA-based approaches are provided. Steps for further development are also outlined.

Charlaine Harris, whose Sookie Stackhouse books inspired the television series "True Blood," will release the first book in a new trilogy next year. Harris' novel "Texoma" will be published in fall 2018 by Saga Press, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Simon & Schuster, the publisher announced in a news release. The first installment in the trilogy is based on Harris' short story "The Gunnie," which first appeared in the 2016 anthology "Unfettered II: New Tales by Masters of Fantasy." "Texoma" will be a work of speculative fiction that takes place in "an alternate history of a broken America weakened by the Great Depression and the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." In the novel, what was the United States is now five territories, including New America, an area of the Pacific Northwest under the control of Canada, and the Holy Russian Empire, formerly the states of California and Oregon.

Robots may not be taking over everyone's jobs quite yet, but they are making their way into the small business world. More companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve how they interact with and service their customers -- namely, with chatbots. NCR Silver asked two experts about how chatbots, or "conversational AI," are being used. According to Adelyn Zhou, founder of tech research and advisory firm Topbots, a chatbot is "a computer program that you can talk to, whether it's by voice or text." If you've ever asked Siri a question on your iPhone or told Alexa (Amazon Echo) to skip ahead to the next song in your playlist, you're probably familiar with chatbot tech.