YouTube erected a platform where commoners could climb the ladder to stardom. Now, the video-sharing giant is seeing another wave of new talent diving into a glittering entertainment scene. These entertainers are called "virtual YouTubers," or "VTubers," and are represented by digital avatars that look like anime characters. Almost exclusively a Japanese phenomenon, at least so far, these virtual talents have proliferated rapidly over the past several months and people in the industry, together with observers, predict the movement will only accelerate. Following are some questions and answers about virtual YouTubers.

Impact of AI in the Digital and Broadcast Media Industry Impact of'Digitization' in the media space is likely to put over half a trillion USD at stake, as per industry estimates.The digital paradigm in the media industry is expected to restructure the entire business model. In the digital age, user experience has moved away from being content driven to'on-demand' delivery, offered in a device of consumer choice.Emphasis in the coming years is likely to be placed at the intersection of content, technology, and user experience. A number of emerging technologies are disrupting existing business models within the media industry and are offering new opportunities, which traditional enterprises are only beginning to acknowledge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being increasingly used to transform the way media houses create content and present them to viewers.AI, by virtue of its data driven intelligence and self-learning abilities, can be used to automate repetitive skill-based jobs. Additionally, AI can power the development of superior prediction engines that offer cutting-edge analytics and business intelligence to media enterprises globally.

Facial recognition tech is becoming more sophisticated, with some firms claiming it can even read our emotions and detect suspicious behaviour. But what implications does this have for privacy and civil liberties? Facial recognition tech has been around for decades, but it has been progressing in leaps and bounds in recent years due to advances in computing vision and artificial intelligence (AI), tech experts say. It is now being used to identify people at borders, unlock smart phones, spot criminals, and authenticate banking transactions. But some tech firms are claiming it can also assess our emotional state.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will create as many jobs in the UK as it will displace over the next 20 years, a report has claimed. The analysis by accountancy giant PwC found AI would boost economic growth, creating new roles as others fell away. But it warned there would be "winners and losers" by industry sector, with many jobs likely to change. Opinion is split over AI's potential impact, with some warning it could leave many out of work in future. The pessimists argue AI is different to previous forms of technological change, because robots and algorithms will be able to do intellectual as well as routine physical tasks.

Score following is the process of tracking a musical performance (audio) with respect to a known symbolic representation (a score). We start this paper by formulating score following as a multimodal Markov Decision Process, the mathematical foundation for sequential decision making. Given this formal definition, we address the score following task with state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as synchronous advantage actor critic (A2C). In particular, we design multimodal RL agents that simultaneously learn to listen to music, read the scores from images of sheet music, and follow the audio along in the sheet, in an end-to-end fashion. All this behavior is learned entirely from scratch, based on a weak and potentially delayed reward signal that indicates to the agent how close it is to the correct position in the score. Besides discussing the theoretical advantages of this learning paradigm, we show in experiments that it is in fact superior compared to previously proposed methods for score following in raw sheet music images.

Machine learning is the idea that describes computers that can essentially "learn" and process new information without specifically being programed to do so. If you give a computer a task, it will more-or-less get better at that task the more it has a chance to engage in it. Object detection is a subset of this idea and is of particular relevance to photos. Not only does object detection let you know which objects are in a photo (hence the name), it also gives you insight into precisely where they are, too. But out of all the industries and activities where object detection is poised to make a big impact, drone services are undoubtedly right at the top.

The tech giants are racing to get digital assistants into our homes - the Amazon Echo Dot currently has a 40% discount during Amazon Prime Day - but debate rages over whether they are suitable for children. There have certainly been teething problems. Toy giant Mattel abandoned its "AI babysitter", Aristotle, last year following privacy concerns. And music streaming service Spotify is currently testing a way of filtering out songs with explicit lyrics following complaints from parents that family-friendly versions of tracks did not play by default when requested on smart speakers. Amazon Echo meanwhile added a feature to encourage children to be more polite to it following concerns that the abrupt way in which people talk to it was teaching children to be rude.

Remember the movie "The Imitation Game"? The tragic story of a brilliant man who decrypted secret German Enigma messages, indirectly shortened World War II, saved millions of lives, and was later charged for homosexuality, forced to undergo chemical treatment, and ended his life shortly after? The real Alan Turing accomplished many more brilliant miracles than this. He also published papers on theories of artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, the title "The Imitation Game" had little to do with the movie. It was a game he mentioned in one of his papers where humans will one day engineer a machine to imitate humans so well that a human on the other side of the room will be fooled he was communicating with another human. Turing was a pioneer in the field of computer science. Only after his death would he be known as the father of AI.

Last September, the world welcomed Juggalos (or Juggalettes, depending on which you prefer) to The Resistance when they marched on Washington en masse to protest the policies of the Trump administration. As if they weren't already doing the absolute most, the die-hard fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse have become accidental heroes for people concerned about facial recognition tech: According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology. In a series of follow-up tweets, @tahkion explained that facial recognition works by pinpointing the areas of contrast on a human face--for instance, where a nose is located, or where the chin becomes the neck. As it happens, juggalo makeup often involves applying black paint below the mouth, but above the chin. That makes facial recognition vulnerable to misidentifying the placement of the jaw.

Sabio, the Leaders in App Science, today announced the appointment of Dr. Jike Chong, Chief Data Scientist at Acorns, to its advisory board. Dr. Chong brings, to Sabio, extensive experience advising companies on how Artificial Intelligence can help solve the problems facing multiple industry verticals. Commenting on the appointment, Aziz Rahim, CEO of Sabio, stated, "Adding someone of Dr. Jike Chong's caliber to our advisory board further validates our business and approach to helping companies exceed their marketing goals through improved data analytics and insights. Dr. Jike Chong's contributions will enable us to continue empowering our clients with predictive business intelligence that gives a competitive advantage to today's mobile savvy marketers. We look forward to the strategic guidance Dr. Chong will provide Sabio's rapidly growing customer base and business."