Then again, even after 19 films in Disney's superhero universe, it's not as if he's had much strong competition. Aside from the puckish Loki and tragic Killmonger, most Marvel villains have been pretty forgettable. Now, after years of build up (we first caught a glimpse of Thanos in 2012's The Avengers) he finally took center stage in this summer's Avengers: Infinity War. But what's most intriguing about Thanos isn't that he wants to wipe out half of life across the universe -- instead, it's that he's a big purple alien who feels genuine emotion. He cries when he's forced to sacrifice Gamora, his adopted daughter.

Marius cursed and jammed a mic stand between the crash bars of the TV studio door. "If SWAT's on its way, we don't have much time," he said. Michaela, who up until a couple of minutes ago had been streaming their interview live, still sat on one of the oval chairs under the hot lights. "What are they talking about?" The cube-shaped television studio had black-painted walls surrounding the bright stage area. Big monitors on the walls were showing the same "live" feed as they had five minutes ago, but now a red banner flashed at the bottom of the screens: ACTIVE SHOOTER AT COMPLETE PICTURES BUILDING. Michaela pointed at a moving figure on the screen. Apparently I like assault rifles." Adan, their cameraman, had called up a local news feed after the first shouts of panic and confusion filtered through the studio's thick doors. What it showed was entirely and completely not what the three of them were seeing. Marius was inside the windowless second-floor studio, empty-handed, yet the monitors showed what looked like a drone feed of him moving into and out of view through the building's windows on the 10th floor. He was armed, and every now and then he would pause and shoot, calmly and methodically. Marius shook his head in disgust. "Hey, Adan, could you give me a hand with this?" The cameraman was hunched over his laptop. "The same people who own the SWAT team," said Marius. "But forget what I said.

It's been the bane of any cable TV subscriber. They get frustrated with their provider and want to switch but have few alternatives available. For residents of Los Angeles, Sacramento, Houston and Indianapolis this year, 5G could be change that. These are the four markets Verizon will be testing 5G later this year. The 5G networks have been touted as the next big thing for wireless consumers, a way for them to get faster service, with videos that will open immediately and downloads that will take seconds instead of minutes.

The technique was developed by an international team led by a group from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and including researchers from the University of Bath, Technicolor, TU Munich and Stanford University. The work, called Deep Video Portraits, was presented for the first time at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference in Vancouver on 16th August. Unlike previous methods that are focused on movements of the face interior only, Deep Video Portraits can also animate the whole face including eyes, eyebrows, and head position in videos, using controls known from computer graphics face animation. It can even synthesise a plausible static video background if the head is moved around. Hyeongwoo Kim from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics explains: "It works by using model-based 3D face performance capture to record the detailed movements of the eyebrows, mouth, nose, and head position of the dubbing actor in a video. The research is currently at the proof-of-concept stage and is yet to work at real time, however the researchers anticipate the approach could make a real difference to the visual entertainment industry. Professor Christian Theobalt, from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, said: "Despite extensive post-production manipulation, dubbing films into foreign languages always presents a mismatch between the actor on screen and the dubbed voice.

Trust is frustratingly scattershot, seemingly conflating two separate issues: that of AI that surpasses us and has about as much concern for us as we have for the ants we thoughtlessly trod on; and the unimaginably vast amounts of data about everything we collect everyday, the abuse of which, such as by Cambridge Analytica, can literally change the course of entire nations (see: the electoral triumphs of Trump and Brexit). There are connections -- AI learns by ingesting raw data, and will learn how to manipulate us even better than humans holding that data can -- but that never quite gels here. Perhaps the film's very brief running time -- under 80 minutes -- wasn't the best choice: these are matters that could keep a documentary TV series busy for many weeks. In the reminder that many scientific advances -- such as, say, nuclear fission -- once deemed to be impossible or off in the distant future have come to pass very soon after such predictions are made. In the warning that we very quickly get used to and utterly blasé about technology that initially seems horrifying.

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.

Amazon is set to shake up the cable insudtry with a new TV box that allows users to record live shows without a subscription. Codenamed Frank, it will have its own storage for shows, and connect to TVs via Amazon's existing Fire TV box, according to Bloomberg. It describes the gadget as'a new type of digital video recorder for the streaming era.' Codenamed Frank, the new device will have its own storage for shows, and connect to TVs via Amazon's existing Fire TV box, according to Bloomberg. It cited'a person familiar with the plans'. Users will be able to record live TV and stream the video to a smartphone or TV so it can be watched later.

The late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have warned that human civilization is at risk from the unfettered development of AI, which could lead to autonomous weapons of terror. Such fears led staff at Google earlier this year to press the company to halt a drone contract with the Pentagon. The technology, still in its early stages, has also been decried for built-in racial bias that can amplify existing stereotypes. That's particularly worrisome as more companies use it for decisions such as hiring, and police leverage AI-powered software to identify suspects. MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who is Black, found facial recognition software could more easily identify her face when she wore a white mask, a result of algorithms that relied on data sets of mostly white faces.

You might know motion capture as the tech that transformed Andy Serkis into Gollum, but now it can transform everyday people into animated avatars in virtual worlds, and all in real-time. Motion capture--which uses body sensors, ultra-precise cameras, and modeling software to create 3D animations from real-life human movement--is now taking on location-based virtual reality, or LBVR. PCWorld visited a leading motion capture company called Vicon in Oxford, England to learn how mocap has evolved to take on this new frontier in entertainment. If you've watched behind-the-scenes footage of how motion capture (or mocap) works, you've probably seen actors in skintight lycra suits covered with golf ball-sized sensors. Normally, dozens of infrared cameras track these sensors to model an actor's movements.

Ugly is a film built on beautiful contradictions. The characters have odd, blocky proportions and stumble around like a group of drunk boxers. The town, too, is comprised of weirdly angular cars, buildings, bicycles and trash bags. There's a consistency to the art style, though, that resembles origami and the papercraft video game Tearaway. And the lighting, a stunning mixture of pastel pinks and blues, gives every frame a warm, inviting sheen.