This is a hard topic to cover. I know a number of journalists and appreciate their work in communicating these advances to a wide audience. It's a hard job to convey complex concepts and in many cases they're not at fault for how it becomes warped by the broader community. Sadly, regardless of the exact way these research stories are warped, most AI and ML stories in the media will result in an audibly groan from researchers. As a researcher in the rapidly progressing field of machine learning, I see no need to fictionalize the tremendous advances we see.

Sarah Young listens to Pandora constantly. From the moment the 27-year-old hairstylist wakes up in the morning, she's tuned into one of the service's infinite personalized radio stations. When she's finished getting ready, she flips her laptop shut and heads into work, where an iPad streams Pandora all day. On her way to and from the salon, she listens to the "'90s new wave" station on her phone. Lately, she's noticed more repetition. "One time, they played this Portishead song five times in three hours," says Young. "Things seem to get more repetitive in the mid-afternoon." Young doesn't know it, but she's a lab rat.

A Kansas filmmaker's drone video of the Kansas wheat harvest will premiere next month at the New York City Drone Film Festival. The Wichita Eagle reported Monday http://bit.ly/2lrrePw that his video t is among 32 entries accepted to be shown March 17-19 at the drone film festival. A trailer of the movie shows a race against time as harvest gets underway complete with music, combines, gray skies, and thunder. Armknecht has been capturing farm life in Kansas for the past five years. He says the aerial shots give unique views of the farm and allow the scenery of Kansas to shine. A trailer of the movie shows a race against time as harvest gets underway complete with music, combines, gray skies, and thunder.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was one of the most important blockbuster games of 2014, proving that an open-world title set in a very familiar fantasy world could still feel fresh and innovative. And apparently, it was popular enough to get a sequel... including on a platform that isn't even out yet. Warner Bros. has unveiled Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a follow-up that will be available on PS4, Windows PCs, the Xbox One and Project Scorpio -- yes, this is one of the first known titles for Microsoft's 4K-capable console. The publisher isn't saying what the Scorpio version will bring to the table, but it'll launch this holiday season. Every other edition arrives on August 22nd.

Digital Asset Managers and administrators spend an enormous amount of time and energy on metadata application. It is tedious, thankless work, but absolutely necessary to find assets in the sea of digital petabytes. In the last few years, we've seen a growing number of applications -- Facebook, Ancestry.com, Netflix -- make use of machine learning to help perform specific tasks. Isn't it time your digital asset management (DAM) system did as well?

Elon Musk is arguably one of the most influential inventors of our modern age. Head of both Tesla and SpaceX, he is at once a pioneer, entrepreneur, environmentalist, and disruptor extraordinaire. Here are 12 books he recommends. Been meaning to get educated on AI? This Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 will help you grasp the far-reaching implications of artificial intelligence on human life and our world as a whole. Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this is an utterly engrossing, comprehensive biography of Albert Einstein.

The title of "Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor" sequel and its release date have been accidentally leaked by discount store retailer Target. And while the leak has already been removed from the website, it continues to live on through different online news publications and social networking sites. Just this Sunday, the gaming community noticed that Target apparently published a listing for the "Shadow of Mordor 2." The entry was entitled "Middle Earth: Shadow of War." The preorder page also included what is now believed to be the release date of the game, Aug. 22. In addition, the listing indicated that the game will be selling for $59.99.

We investigate a novel cluster-of-bandit algorithm CAB for collaborative recommendation tasks that implements the underlying feedback sharing mechanism by estimating the neighborhood of users in a context-dependent manner. CAB makes sharp departures from the state of the art by incorporating collaborative effects into inference as well as learning processes in a manner that seamlessly interleaving explore-exploit tradeoffs and collaborative steps. We prove regret bounds under various assumptions on the data, which exhibit a crisp dependence on the expected number of clusters over the users, a natural measure of the statistical difficulty of the learning task. Experiments on production and real-world datasets show that CAB offers significantly increased prediction performance against a representative pool of state-of-the-art methods.

Thanks to a Target ad accidentally posted online we now know of the existence of Shadow of War, sequel to 2014's excellent Middle-earth action game, Shadow of Mordor. The leak was spotted by a NeoGaf user and box-art was downloaded from Target's website before the leaked material was taken down. Warner Bros. was reportedly teasing a March 8th announcement for an unnamed game many assumed would be the next Batman: Arkham title. It's possible the announcement was for Shadow of War instead. I've reached out to the publisher for comment.

China set a record high in terms of venture capital (VC) investments in 2016, despite a global slowdown. The strong performance is expected to continue with artificial intelligence (AI) an additional focus for investors, finds latest KPMG analysis. Investment by VCs in China increased 19 percent year on year to USD31 billion in 2016, although deal volumes declined 42 percent to 300 from 513 a year earlier, according to Venture Pulse, KPMG's quarterly global report on VC trends. The strong performance is attributed to a number of mega-deals recorded early in the year. The report highlights that artificial intelligence and cognitive learning are poised to transform almost every aspect of people's lives.