Media
I never thought I'd see Master Chief drive around Northumberland
Halo's armored hero, Master Chief, has fought the Covenant on a raft of planets throughout the galaxy. One place the super-soldier hasn't visited, though, is a village called Bamburgh on the northeast coast of England. At Gamescom 2018, I was shown a special Halo event that will appear in Forza Horizon 4 later this year. The course, presented as a virtual "training exercise," lets you drive the rugged Warthog through dense forests and sandy beaches. It looked like terrific fun and will, if nothing else, be a nice distraction while fans wait for Halo Infinite.
How machine learning is revolutionizing journalism - ICIJ
The rise of the machine has freed ICIJ members globally to pore over millions of documents in a custom-built search engine. But even this next-level research has posed substantial challenges: for example, what to do when certain phrases return an indigestible 150,000 results? Clearly, the next step to speeding up our research was to intelligently filter information relevant to each investigation. Here's how we streamlined the previously daunting process, giving us both unprecedented flexibility and the required search success rate. In leaks like the Paradise Papers, we dealt with millions of documents (including PDFs, photos, and emails) that traditional platforms like Excel can't process.
DaVinci Resolve 15 is a free, Hollywood-grade video editor
With the latest release of DaVinci Resolve 15, Blackmagic Design has radically made over its editing suite to create one of the best video-editing systems at any price -- even against mainstream options like Premiere Pro CC and Apple's Final Cut Pro X. It now comes with Fusion, a powerful visual effects (VFX) app used in Hollywood films, along with an excellent color corrector and audio editor. Despite doing more than most editors will ever need, the full studio release costs just $300, and you can get a stripped-down version with most features for a grand total of zero dollars. I use Adobe's Premiere Pro CC as part of its Creative Cloud suite, which costs more than $50 a month, so Resolve 15 is certainly a cheaper option. After trying it out for a week, would I be willing to switch?
Facebook and Twitter uncover 'coordinated' global misinformation operations on huge scale
Technology experts have uncovered a vast misinformation campaign attempting to spread stories on a hugescale. Facebook, and Twitter have found and removed hundreds of accounts that were apparently set up to target users in the US, UK, Latin America and the Middle East. But it is not clear what the campaign was being used for. The accounts appear to have been tied to Iranian actors and cybersecurity firms said they had appeared to be promoting Iran's geopolitical agenda around the world. But whether the campaign was being set up to launch any more specific or targeted attack remains unclear.
MIT made an image editing AI that can replace the background in any image
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) just developed an AI-assisted image editing tool that automates object selection. This is the Holy Grail of selection tools -- you can behold it in the video below. For millions of people, Photoshop is a program that's used to bring out the best visual features in images. But at TNW we're more likely to use it to make Mark Zuckerberg look like a vampire or to put a sombrero on a hacker. And, speaking only for myself, using Photoshop is time-consuming and hard.
Video Tuesday: Robot Film Festival Highlights
Even though we do our best to bring you a solid 52 Video Fridays every year (which works out to over 1,000 robot videos annually), we can't manage to post everything, and sometimes, we miss out on some awesome stuff. That's just one of the reasons why we always look forward to the Robot Film Festival, and the 2018 event took place in July in Portland, Ore. I showed up and gave a talk (most of which you can see in this article), and then found a seat and watched the film selections. As always, there was an impressive amount of really, really good robot videos that I'd never seen before. The videos have all been posted online, and we've picked out a few of the happiest, saddest, scariest, and cleverest to share.
r/MachineLearning - [D] If you had to show one paper to someone to show that machine learning is beautiful, what would you choose? (assuming they're equipped to understand it)
The graphs are related to the dimensionality reduction. The experiment is try to reduce the dimensionality of MNIST dataset (set of images of hand-drawn digits) as much as possible without loosing their separability in the lower dimensional space. On the right is algorithm PCA which reduces the dimension by eliminating the directions which have less variance and then projecting the data on the remaining dimensions. On the left is auto-encoder (think it like a neural network same number of nodes at input and output layers, but very few at the middle, 2 in this case) which feeds the image at input layer and expect the same image at output layer, but near the middle of the network, the number of layers are drastically reduced, thus creating a squeezing kind of process, or information bottleneck kind of phenomenon. The magic is in the output.
Oxygrams with AI Communications Pattern Analysis
Oxygram is a free news and multimedia platform with advanced AI communications pattern search for iPhone and iPad. Oxygram is a complete platform which can be customized for client needs. That is, instead of getting stuck with the privacy failings, absurd news policy restrictions and lack of control over content, we can customize for your specific needs. Oxygram is a social media platform that users can both "slide" up and down as well as "swipe" right-left to see essentially unlimited text, videos, pics, audio recordings including pre-recorded music and audio from their own library. Create freehand paintings or drawings using the drawing features and library and/or multimedia images called Acticons-Action Icons.
Reddit down: Website hit by major outage just hours after site went completely offline
Reddit has stopped working completely. Visitors to the site see a message reading "our CDN was unable to reach our servers," accompanied by a picture of a sad alien. The outage comes just hours after a huge issue that took the site down completely and forced Reddit to promise to fix the problem publicly. 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.
Automated journalism creeps into newsrooms leaning on AI
Is this article written by a bot? In a few years, it might be hard to say one way or another. Artificial intelligence is being applied to many different industries, and the areas of news and journalism are certainly no exception. In fact, automated journalism is already helping create news articles and enhance storytelling. The Washington Post reported last year that its own AI bot, known as Heliograf, published 850 stories entirely autonomously, primarily reporting on sports and the outcomes of regional political races.