The impact of fake news on the recent election has focused public attention on this multi-tentacled and growing problem. Vast swaths of the population fall prey to such misinformation, while others struggle to discern unbiased truth from the morass of lies and distortions that surrounds us. Experts recommend that we to follow basic principles of information hygiene to separate fake from real, including checking sources, looking for bad grammar and typos, and seeking out corroborating information. And top of the list: never believe anything you read on . However, none of these techniques is particularly effective.

Although deep learning models have proven effective at solving problems in natural language processing, the mechanism by which they come to their conclusions is often unclear. As a result, these models are generally treated as black boxes, yielding no insight of the underlying learned patterns. In this paper we consider Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and demonstrate a new approach for tracking the importance of a given input to the LSTM for a given output. By identifying consistently important patterns of words, we are able to distill state of the art LSTMs on sentiment analysis and question answering into a set of representative phrases. This representation is then quantitatively validated by using the extracted phrases to construct a simple, rule-based classifier which approximates the output of the LSTM.

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Founder Michael Keaton gives a performance of ratty, reptilian brilliance as Ray Kroc, the American salesman who turned a California burger stand into the global fast-food behemoth that is McDonald's, in John Lee Hancock's shrewd and satisfyingly fat-free biopic. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant. La La Land Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same.

Facial recognition systems -- computers that can verify a person's identity from a digital image or video still -- have been around for a few years now. Following a recent explosion in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, facial recognition software is about to spread well beyond security cameras and criminal databases. Computers are becoming so good at recognizing faces that soon enough consumers will be able to use them to make purchases, book tickets and unlock doors simply by looking into a camera lens and letting the software make rapid simultaneous measurements of the face that's as distinct as a fingerprint. This far more secure, AI-powered facial recognition software would be more convenient and create new exciting apps and hardware, but it could also let security forces track and identify people with far more precision. "It's a little creepy, but undeniably impressive," wrote Will Knight, a reporter for MIT Technology Review, which published a piece on Wednesday about some of the latest facial recognition technology. The article is part of a series of reports on the latest breakthrough technologies poised to change the way we live and interact with the world.

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.

The internet is a tough place to have a conversation. Abuse has driven celebrities and ordinary folks from social media platforms that are ill-equipped to deal with it, and some publishers have switched off comment sections. That's why Google and Jigsaw (an early stage incubator at Google parent company Alphabet) are working on a project called Perspective. It uses artificial intelligence to try to identify toxic comments, with an aim of reducing them. The Perspective API released Thursday will provide developers with a score of how likely users are to perceive a comment as toxic.

When it comes to running a small or mid-sized business, answering the phone is an essential part of the day-to-day. And even though a ringing telephone may distract from urgent tasks, it might not make financial sense to hire a full-time receptionist. Of course, letting the phone just ring or go to voice mail isn't a viable long-term solution, so what do you do? When it comes to running a small or mid-sized business, answering the phone is an essential part of the day-to-day. Interactive voice response (IVR) can be a lifesaver in such cases. Hosted IVR, which is IVR delivered via the cloud, by subscription, now makes a lot more sense for SMBs from a cost perspective.

Civil conversation in the comment sections of news sites can be hard to come by these days. Whatever intelligent observations do lurk there are often drowned out by obscenities, ad-hominem attacks, and off-topic rants. Some sites, like the one you're reading, hide the comments section behind a link at the bottom of each article; many others have abolished theirs completely. One of the few beacons of hope in the morass of bad comments shines at The New York Times, where some articles are accompanied by a stream of respectful, largely thoughtful ideas from readers. But the Times powers its comment section with an engine few other news organizations can afford: a team of human moderators that checks nearly every single comment before it gets published.

If you've spent any time at all on the internet, you know that finding civil conversation can be a real challenge. Whether on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or your favorite news site, trolls can often dominate and derail the conversation. Today, Alphabet company Jigsaw has announced that it is using its machine learning chops to combat the problem. Perspective, which launches today, is an "early-stage" technology using machine learning to identify "toxic" comments. Furthermore, publishers will have access to an API to include this technology on their sites in the hopes that it'll lead to better conversations.

Get ready to be truly terrified of aliens when Ridley Scott's new sci-fi movie, "Alien: Covenant," hits theatres in less than three months. A four-minute sneak peek video was released during the premiere of a new episode of FX's "Legion" Wednesday night. It shows the whole crew of a colony ship named Covenant traveling to a remote planet in the galaxy that is touted to be an uncharted paradise. Of course, fans of Scott's numerous films on extra-terrestrials know all too well that nothing is what it seems. This upcoming movie is sequel to the 2012 blockbuster hit "Prometheus."