UK broadcaster Channel 4's progressive approach to content is seeping through to its ad strategy. While publicly-owned and touting a successful on-demand digital arm, the television company still relies on good old TV advertising for a large part of its revenue. However, gains from ad spend, which makes up about 93% of its total revenue, dipped around £40m last year as a result of a TV ad market decline of 3%. To offset this, Channel 4 has been working to make its ad spots more effective and accessible to a wider pool brands without making its programming more ad-laden, and has turned to advertising technology as a possible solution. Currently in trial and dubbed'Contextual Moments', the broadcaster has unveiled AI-driven ad tech that allows brands to target nuanced moments and scenarios within a programme, and place a relevant ad within the following break.

We are a small team based in Sweden who are passionate about music, entertainment and large sound experiences. When we realised that the majority of our friends and family wanted to have a sound system, home cinema rig and a portable speaker in their lives, yet felt off-put by the complicated, stationary and often expensive sound systems on the market - we decided to do something about it. Our journey began in 2014. With the help from backers just like yourself, we crowdfunded and developed a successful stackable and reshapeable artificial intelligence speaker called AiFi. Today, after further development of the unexplored potential in our first product, we have a new one.

A new algorithm could dramatically slash the time it can take computers to recommend movies or route taxis. The new algorithm developed by Harvard University researchers solves optimization problems exponentially faster than previous algorithms by cutting the number of steps required. Surprisingly, this approach works "without sacrificing the quality of the resulting solution," says study senior author Yaron Singer at Harvard University. Optimization problems seek to find the best answer from all possible solutions, such as mapping the fastest route from point A to point B. Many algorithms designed to solve optimization problems have not changed since they were first described in the 1970s. Previous optimization algorithms generally worked in a step-by-step process, with the number of steps proportional to the amount of the data analyzed.

Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Donald Trump on that video, or am I being duped? New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot the phonies.

Scott Cohen, co-founder of the large digital distribution company The Orchard, recently said that "there will be a number one song that's 100% AI-written." Which is a scary thought, not only because it will displace millions of people from work, but because it removes the creativity and humanism from music. It's not unthinkable that decades from now much of the music that we listen to will be created using advanced software that figures out the optimum beats and lyrics for record sales. Is that a world that we want to live in? Technology is great, it's awesome, and it's saving lives at a rapid pace, but to create music with it is a completely different situation.

A robot from Japan named "Pepper" is the newest edition at Tutor Me SOS in Stamford. The robot, the only one of its kind in Connecticut, is being programmed to prepare kids for the future and will interact with the 500 students enrolled at the center. Tutor Me SOS owner Mona Mitri says the robot is so impressive, with its ability to communicate by voice and touch. "It's unbelievable because no matter where you move, it follows you," she says. Pepper's battery lasts roughly 14 hours.

With rise of digital age, there is an explosion of information in the form of news, articles, social media, and so on. Much of this data lies in unstructured form and manually managing and effectively making use of it is tedious, boring and labor intensive. This explosion of information and need for more sophisticated and efficient information handling tools gives rise to Information Extraction(IE) and Information Retrieval(IR) technology. Information Extraction systems takes natural language text as input and produces structured information specified by certain criteria, that is relevant to a particular application. Various sub-tasks of IE such as Named Entity Recognition, Coreference Resolution, Named Entity Linking, Relation Extraction, Knowledge Base reasoning forms the building blocks of various high end Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Machine Translation, Question-Answering System, Natural Language Understanding, Text Summarization and Digital Assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now. This paper introduces Information Extraction technology, its various sub-tasks, highlights state-of-the-art research in various IE subtasks, current challenges and future research directions.

There are so many floating rings to choose from.Credit: Epic / Erik Kain One of Fortnite's Week 10 challenges is a familiar one: Players have to skydive through 20 floating rings. We saw a similar challenge back in Season 3. I'm not sure how I feel about Epic recycling these challenges, but I suppose if they're short on cool new ideas that's bound to happen. In any case, this is a simple challenge though it will take you quite a few matches to complete. You're unlikely to dive through more than two or three rings in a row, meaning at the very least you'll need to play 7 to 10 matches to complete the challenge. See the full list of week 10 challenges here.

Have you been wanting to buy one of those Amazon Echo talking speakers, but never got around to it? Mark Monday, July 16 on your calendar: there will probably be a great deal on one. Amazon's Prime Day is set for Monday, July 16th, the made-up summer holiday that's turned into one of the e-tailer's biggest sales day of the year. On today's episode of #TalkingTech, we offer tips on how to start preparing now to save on Prime Day, one of Amazon's biggest sales days of the year. The sale starts Monday July 16 at 12 p.m. Pacific/3 p.m. Eastern.

Today's best deals are on fun and productive items. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. When a national holiday falls in the middle of the work week, it's like a mini weekend in the middle of all that work. But coming back to work on Thursday can be a real slog.