The day before the election, as millions of Americans were feeling confident that the vast majority of the country shared their opinions, a pair of researchers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute published a paper that looked closely at something many of us ignored: the provenance of political tweets. Where do they come from? How many are, in reality, made by humans? And if not, who is designing these crude straw-bots? Analyzing Twitter during three televised debates, they discovered that 20% of all political tweets were made by bots.

I must admit however that I find that it odd that you introduce so many heuristics/restrictions (fixed embedding size, fixed sequence length, etc), in handling the input-output pairs for the feedforward encoder-decoder. It strikes me that part of the contribution is to get rid of heuristics to increase program search efficiency through machine learning. Although your approach does greatly improve with respect to a weakly-informed baseline; you also introduce the need for even further tuning of fixed parameters/restrictions to be able to learn your model. Perhaps in this context a GRU/LSTM to replace the current feed forward encoder/decoder isn't such a bad idea after all?

Google released an update for Google Play Music, its music-streaming service. With this update, the service will use machine learning to present a user with personalized music recommendations based on "signals" such as their location, current activity and the weather. For instance, a selection of workout music may appear when a user walks into a gym. Google said users can opt in to receive these personalized recommendations. In addition, the app's home screen has been updated to provide users with additional personalized content.

Chinese drone maker DJI unveiled two new drones aimed at advanced amateurs and filmmakers here Tuesday on the Warner Bros. studio backlot. The introduction comes just weeks after DJI introduced its lowest-priced, consumer drone, Mavic, which has been plagued by production issues. DJI says orders for the $750 (without controller) or full-service $999 Mavic will be filled in 4-6 weeks. The Mavic's main competition, the $1,100 GoPro Karma, was released in October and recalled two weeks later, after reports of the Karma losing power during filming. The Phantom Pro 4 is aimed at drone enthusiasts, starting at $1,499, and starts shipping next week.

Turns out that DJI's Mavik wasn't the company's only new airframe for the year. On Tuesday, a pair of updated drone models joined the family: the Phantom 4 Pro and the Inspire 2. The Phantom 4 Pro (P4P) is the upgraded version of the Phantom 4 (P4), which debuted earlier this year. The P4, if you recall, integrated a suite of obstacle avoidance systems: a pair of stereoscopic sensors mounted on the front of the drone. The P4P builds on that system, adding a second pair of stereoscopic sensors on the rear of the frame as well as an infrared sensor on either flank. These IR sensors have a 7m range -- shorter than the 30m range of the front and rear stereos but still plenty farsighted to avoid sideswiping trees and fences.

That fake news and misinformation on Facebook could have influenced the outcome of the US presidential election is worrying (Opinion, 15 November), but, in reality, this is only tinkering around the edges of a major problem. The first amendment of the US constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press. However, for the most part, the supreme court has failed to use it to rule on libel cases: hence tabloids such as the National Enquirer can get away with printing pretty much anything they like. It is possible to police the publishing and broadcasting industry – if nations are willing to do it. Sufficient staff (not robots) need to be employed to fact-check before publishing or broadcasting.

The online dating app has announced that its latest update allows users to type a word that describes their gender identity. The West Hollywood, California-based company says in a blog post Tuesday that users also can choose to be shown in searches that best reflect that identity.

The danger with toys is that too often they're not taken seriously. This is the case with Snap's new Spectacles. Buried deep in the excess of the plastic and PR lies a camera system that tells us a lot about the future of commerce, security and communication. With rumors that Apple could design smart-glasses, and Mark Zuckerberg's call for "camera-first" photo-sharing, it's clear that some companies have already started to realize the immense business opportunity offered by cheap cameras coupled with smart machine learning. Imagine a pill bottle that you don't want falling into the wrong hands.

Feature AI are often seen as cold, calculating machines, devoid of any warmth or humanity. One way to make AI more relatable and human-like could be encouraging them to take part in human activities like making music. Using AI is one of the geekiest ways to make tunes, and has been around since the 80s. It's a thriving area of research with dedicated academic conferences. And with the recent boom in machine learning, it also means the quality of music created by AI seems to be getting better too.

Is Spotify damaging your hard drive? Spotify has issued a fix for a bug for that has been bombarding user's hard drives with huge amounts of data for as long as five months Multiple reports on Spotify's user forums and across the internet appear to show that the bug is not isolated to any one region. 'Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters' machines, even when the app was idle', reported Ars Technica. 'Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB'. Millions of devastated Tinder users are forced to spend a... Google's self-driving cars can now perform tricky...