Something odd happened around the country while the Super Bowl commercial for the Google Home speaker ran on TVs everywhere. The ad, which showed loving families using the smart home speaker for listening to music and turning on and off the lights, also managed to set off Google Homes in the real world, surprising their owners. Google Home owners quickly ran to Twitter to explain that since the advertisement features someone saying "Okay, Google," their Home units were activated at the same time. These users had no recourse but to let this happen, as Google's speaker offers no option to set a different wake phrase. Some owners of Amazon's Echo, Dot and Tap speakers may be familiar with this moment, as a TV news report in San Diego once triggered the Alexa-based speakers to order dollhouses.

Noah Hawley's "Legion," on FX, the latest Marvel production based on the X-Men, has an aesthetic that might be described as caustic whimsy. It's a sleek, stylized diorama of alarming imagery, as much about fear orange and misery avocado and rage yellow as it is about anything else. You don't actually have to understand much about the X-Men to enjoy watching it. This is good news, since the X-Men, a byzantine superhero mythology that launched, in 1963, as a comic-book series, has always intimidated me. I've got a layman's knowledge of the movies, and I enjoyed Marvel franchises like "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage," spinoffs from adjacent mythologies. On occasion, I've tried to absorb the Wikipedia page about the comic books, a document that makes the Talmud look like SparkNotes.

Lady Gaga's Super Bowl LI halftime show on Sunday had something many viewers had never seen before: Hundreds of light-emitting drones flying in a synchronized pattern to show the American flag and, later, the Pepsi logo. How'd they pull that off? It's thanks to an Intel technology called Shooting Star, which lets programmers design airborne light shows with swarms of drones. Here's more on how Shooting Star works, via Wired: Each drone is about a foot long square, weighs just over eight ounces, and sports a plastic and foam body to soften inadvertent impacts. They aren't as flashy as consumer quadcopters, which is just as well, because you're not supposed to notice them.

Leila Kosseim, associate professor in Concordia's Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, and a recently-graduated doctoral student, Shamima Mithun, have developed a system called BlogSum that has potentially vast applications. It allows an organization to pose a question and then find out how a large number of people talking online would respond. The system is capable of gauging things like consumer preferences and voter intentions by sorting through websites, examining real-life self-expression and conversation, and producing summaries that focus exclusively on the original question. "Huge quantities of electronic texts have become easily available on the Internet, but people can be overwhelmed, and they need help to find the real content hiding in the mass of information," explains Kosseim, one of the lead researchers at Concordia's Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CLaC lab). Analyzing informally-written language poses unique challenges compared to analyzing, for example, a news article.

Remember when quadcopter drones juggled balls and formed up into a Star Trek logo? That seems downright quaint compared to what we just saw at Lady Gaga's elaborately produced Super Bowl halftime show. During her first number, 300 Intel drones formed the shape of an American flag, punctuating the singer's wire-assisted fall to the stage below. Ok... Gaga using Drones for the synchronized sky lighting was impressive #SuperBowl #PepsiHalftime pic.twitter.com/SIxuMp3OT1 The "Shooting Star" drones Intel introduced last year are a foot across and weigh just eight ounces, thanks to a foam body designed to soften impacts.

The article was published in Marketer 3(22) 2016 and it is available here: www.sklep.marketerplus.pl If you still believe that your daily activities are the result of your own choices, you are mistaken. Few of us understand that our purchasing decisions, and increasingly our life decisions, are heavily influenced by advanced algorithms. Algorithms divide potential customers into groups on the basis of their behavior, interests or decisions that they make. They don't just analyze data, they predict the path customers will take in the future and, for example, cleverly controlling product margins.

Ever since the election, talking heads have discussed how "fake news" could have tipped the election to Donald Trump by disseminating false stories favorable to him or unfavorable to Hillary Clinton. Social media users can spread these fake new stories far and wide, creating an aura of credibility which can make fake stories hard to distinguish from the truth. Social media websites like Facebook have begun to cooperate with human fact checkers to track fake news websites and notify users that a story is likely false, but it is impossible to trace every single news story as they pop up. There is just too much information on the internet for any human mind to process. So maybe an artificial intelligence (AI) can perform better. Facebook along with researchers and hackers are examining whether artificial intelligence and big data can help track down fake news stories faster than humans can.

Public Sector Agencies Must Adopt Emerging Technologies Like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Effectively Compete for Talent, Accenture Report Finds ARLINGTON, Va.; Feb. 2, 2017 – Public sector agencies must adopt emerging technologies – including machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometrics – to attract and retain more technically adept employees. This approach is critical to addressing a widening skills gap and strong competition from a better financed private sector, a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) shows. The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, examines the adoption of emerging technologies across agencies with the most direct interaction with citizens or the greatest responsibility for citizen-facing services: health and social services, policing/justice, revenue, border services, administration and pensions / social security. As part of the report, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. These technologies include advanced analytics/ predictive modeling, the Internet of Things, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/ identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/ generation.

Google used the Super Bowl to plug its Google Home connectivity service, but the TV commercial apparently confused the systems in homes of those who already have it. For them, Google Home went whacko. Those who already have Google Home took to Twitter to complain that it interfered with their units. Apparently, the home systems heard the TV broadcasts calling its name, and it became befuddled. "The Google commercial had my Google Home going haywire," complained a Twitter user with the handle CheezusPrice.

The best Super Bowl halftime shows leave indelible memories, be it a notorious wardrobe malfunction, that goofy Left Shark, or every last second of Beyoncé's two appearances. It's too soon to say whether anything Lady Gaga did tonight will resonate, but at least she offered something new: An army of dancing drones, ducking and dodging over the Houston skyline, transforming from stars to a fluttering flag. It's probably first time you've seen 300 drones flying in formation, but it's almost certainly not the last. The technology underpinning the Intel Shooting Star drone system is fascinating in and of itself, but its potential applications are even more so. The same drones that accompanied Lady Gaga will one day revolutionize search-and-rescue, agriculture, halftime shows, and more.