In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans' relationship to conscious machines. Whether it's Terminators or Cylons or servants like the "Star Trek" computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient--or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise. What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don't quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving.

Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio out of Montreal (home base). It's not a long segment - about 5 to 10 minutes every week - about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly on iHeart Radio, if you're interested in hearing more of me blathering away about what's going on in the digital world. I'm really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry DiMonte morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans' relationship to conscious machines. Whether it's Terminators or Cylons or servants like the "Star Trek" computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient--or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise. What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don't quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving.

Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create epic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce platforms.

Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create xustpic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.

He's been there for three weeks now -- though he is quick to point out that he was out of the office for one of them so it's really only been two weeks -- but that's not stopping Quartz from launching one of the Bot Studio's first experiments, a Twitter bot to help attendees of the NICAR conference. People going to #NICAR17 can ask a Twitter bot. Keefe says the Bot Studio, which is funded by a $240,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information. Keefe joined Quartz after spending 16 years at WNYC. We spoke about the lessons he learned from public radio, his goals for the Bot Studio, and what it'll take for bots to catch on.

I once spent a week tailing the band Hanson, three teenage boys who had grown up on an island where the only pop available to them was from Time Life rock'n' roll anthologies, 1957-69. And the music they made reflected it -- their songs were the products of people who had thought deeply about Bobby Darin but had never heard Led Zeppelin or LL Cool J. And sometimes I think about Hanson when I'm sitting down to dinner at Kismet, the new quasi-Middle Eastern restaurant on Los Feliz's southern edge. It's not because the sleek dining room is old-fashioned -- the plant-filled Midcentury Modern groove could not be more present-day Los Angeles -- or because its customers, who all look like recent Wesleyan grads, are anything less than yoga-toned and chic. The menu, surpassingly light and vegetable-intensive, has the carefully layered flavors, the touches of heat, tartness and herbal intensity that we have grown to expect from the best new kitchens. The aesthetic of co-chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, whom you may know from Madcapra in Grand Central Market if not from their former restaurant Glasserie out by Brooklyn's Pulaski Bridge, is up-to-date: the tahini is made with sunflower seeds, the dining room smells of za'atar, and Aleppo pepper flows like water.

Today, there is incredible interest in anything that is even remotely related to #Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is dominating the conversation on a variety of levels. Philosophers and thinkers are debating the moral implications and risks for human kind of a world where intelligent machines are ubiquitous. In the media, it seems that a new movie or TV series on AI is launched every month. Academic papers on the topic are receiving attention from far beyond the scope of the usual research audience.

I'm a big Star Wars fan, so when "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" descended on theaters late last year, I braved the crowds to see it -- twice in the first 18 hours. And just like all the other Star Wars movies, "Rogue One" stoked our geeky imaginations with all the technological possibilities of a galaxy far, far away, like holographic displays and all sorts of strange devices. And did you notice the Imperial server farm? Of course, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) was well-represented too: Like C-3P0, R2-D2 and BB-8 in earlier movies, Rogue One's K-2SO displayed uncanny humanness. The futuristic Star Wars-esque world is still mostly the stuff of Hollywood movies, but technology visionaries are hard at work bringing us ever closer.