Before you mock me for writing a piece on the best music from this very strange year for this very informative site, let me tell you that I write about everything under the sun: politics, artificial intelligence, robots ... politics, artificial intelligence, robots ... OK, maybe I only write about three things. But I also write about music. I've covered the stuff for decades. I've interviewed everyone from Joe Strummer to Iggy Pop. I've dressed as a bunny, on stage, holding a klieg light during a Flaming Lips concert.

Ranking a set of objects involves establishing an order allowing for comparisons between any pair of objects in the set. Oftentimes, due to the unavailability of a ground truth of ranked orders, researchers resort to obtaining judgments from multiple annotators followed by inferring the ground truth based on the collective knowledge of the crowd. However, the aggregation is often ad-hoc and involves imposing stringent assumptions in inferring the ground truth (e.g. majority vote). In this work, we propose Expectation-Maximization (EM) based algorithms that rely on the judgments from multiple annotators and the object attributes for inferring the latent ground truth. The algorithm learns the relation between the latent ground truth and object attributes as well as annotator specific probabilities of flipping, a metric to assess annotator quality. We further extend the EM algorithm to allow for a variable probability of flipping based on the pair of objects at hand. We test our algorithms on two data sets with synthetic annotations and investigate the impact of annotator quality and quantity on the inferred ground truth. We also obtain the results on two other data sets with annotations from machine/human annotators and interpret the output trends based on the data characteristics.

Propped over her breakfast at a West Hollywood cafe one morning in late October, Amy Adams was contemplating her dream role. The actress had just dropped her 6-year-old daughter off at school after returning from traveling to promote her two new films, the science-fiction drama "Arrival" and psychological thriller "Nocturnal Animals." Her mother and husband at a nearby table, Adams was preparing for extended family to arrive in town momentarily. "I need to play somebody who just goes around and gets spa treatments," Adams said, wistfully. "I would have to do a lot of spa treatments, just for research. Adams has certainly earned some downtime after turning in her two new complex lead performances. In Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival," which opens Nov. 11, she plays a linguist haunted by an unexplained melancholy who must learn to communicate with aliens in order to prevent a global war. In Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals," which opens a week later, she plays an aloof art gallerist obsessed with her ex-husband's novel. At 42, the five-time Oscar nominee's career has been characterized by a mix of supporting roles, from a naive nun in "Doubt" to the wife of a cult leader in "The Master" to journalist/love interest Lois Lane in the latest round of Superman movies. As "Arrival's" Louise Banks, she reluctantly leads a team of investigators including a scientist played by Jeremy Renner. Much of the film's 10-week shoot took place on a bare soundstage in Montreal, with puppeteers behind a lighted screen serving as the aliens. For the entire production, Adams said, she had a stomachache, a side effect of internalizing Louise's anxiety. "She's not heroic in the traditional sense," Adams said of the character. "I love that she gets to rely on her intellect and instinct as opposed to brawn and bravery." Adams said she prepared for the role by studying linguistics and working with her acting coach on the film's psychological underpinnings, but she is ill-equipped to answer the deep questions the movie raises about science and the nature of time. "It's funny when people start challenging me about it," Adams said, of the movie's internal logic. "If I were able to explain how the science of this film works, I would not be an actress." In "Nocturnal Animals," Adams plays a woman who is equally unmoored, although the milieu -- the Los Angeles fine-art scene -- is far more familiar. Adams' husband is artist Darren Le Gallo, and though his work resides more in the underground art scene than the rarified one depicted in the film, she found some uncomfortable parts of the character to latch onto. "I have definitely been invited into that world at times, the wealth and privilege of a very specific part of the Los Angeles art scene," Adams said. "I found myself really judgmental of this character.

Over the past few days no less than three of the world's biggest providers of streamed video content, Google, Hulu and Microsoft, have moved into the 4K streaming space. First up, Google made good on the promise it gave at the launch of its new Chromecast Ultra in October and delivered the first 4K/UHD movie titles to its Google Play store. In fact, it's leapt in with both feet, serving up 125 films right off the bat. These titles include recent hits like Star Trek: Beyond and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. Google now offers 125 4K movies for Chromecast Ultra owners.

Golden Globes 2017 live updates: 'This is Us' beats'Game of Thrones' in nominations The nominations for the 74th Golden Globe Awards were announced this morning. Issa Rae, Natalie Portman and Ruth Negga all are nominees for their work on both television and film, highlighting the scope of the awards. "Sausage Party" was shut out of most of the (announced) noms. "Zootopia" slipped into the Animated Feature nominations. Multiple nods for comic book underdog "Deadpool."

Google Home may have only been living with us for a short time, but it's quickly becoming our favorite thing in the house. And now it's starting to play a little nicer with the other things we love, with Netflix and Google Photos support beginning to roll out to users. First spotted by Android Police, the update brings a new Videos and Photos tab to the Google Home app's Assistant settings, inside which you will see options for linking your Netflix account and enabling Google Photos. As described in the app, the new features, which require a separate Chromecast and Netflix subscription, will allow users to stream photos to their TV and "play shows and movies by asking your Assistant." Last week, Google announced it was opening its Actions on Google platform, allowing developers to tap directly into the digital assistant to bring voice commands for things like food ordering, news, and shopping, as well as enabling two-way conversations with the device.

Netflix employs an algorithm that helps its users discover movie options, and now it's about to help discover new planetary systems. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough have developed a new approach to identifying stable planetary systems based on the machine learning artificial intelligence Netflix uses. "Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that's predicting whether planetary systems are stable," Dan Tamayo, lead author of the research and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Planetary Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said in a press release. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn new functions without being programmed. This is how Netflix can make scarily accurate predictions of what you're interested in watching without you telling it.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Southern California claimed representation in the Cabinet of President-elect Donald Trump with the announcement that fast-food executive Andrew Puzder has been tapped to be the next Labor secretary. He's head of the Carpinteria parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's -- and is known for employing scantily clad women to hawk oversized burgers. Nominations will be revealed in 25 categories aimed at honoring the best movies and TV shows of the year, as well as the best actors, directors and musical scores. Monday's announcements will begin at 5 a.m.

"The legal industry is ripe for innovation," says attorney and journalist Robert Ambrogi, who covers the role of technology in law. In an influential April 13 blog post, Ambrogi proclaimed a boom in legal tech startups based on a more than doubling of listings on startup directory AngelList. Ambrogi has since produced his own streamlined listing that currently has nearly 500 companies offering technologies to the legal industry. Several are courting attorneys who need better, cheaper ways to sort through the avalanche of legal filings, rulings, and spiderwebs of citations between cases, from the local to federal level. The innovation upsurge may in part be generational.

Is AI the Next CRM Battleground? Posted December 8, 2016 By Artificial intelligence is helping sales and marketing professionals do a better job of getting the right messages to the right prospects. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention of late. Salesforce unleashed a torrent of hype about Einstein, Microsoft is countering with AI features built into Dynamics 365, and of course IBM continues to hit prime time with Watson ads featuring the likes of Bob Dylan and Stephen Hawking. EnterpriseAppsToday.com recently delved into this area in Where is AI Headed in the Enterprise.