Apple is going all-in on artificial intelligence (AI). As it continues to work on Siri, its voice-activated digital assistant, a new interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook sheds a bit of light on just how far the company is willing to go to make Siri a central part of your life. Speaking to Nikkei, Cook waxed philosophical about Siri's intended abilities, saying "AI is horizontal" and should reach across all products. He said the technology should be able to do things like help you manage battery life, recommend music to Apple Music subscribers, and tell you where you parked your car. Cook also discussed Apple's incoming Yokohama research and development center, where it intends to focus on machine learning and AI.

Are you just trying to identify (classify) one of your 50 individuals from a new photo, or are you specifically looking to create an embedding representation that can be used to differentiate individuals not in your training set? For classification purposes that might be enough data (esp. For an embedding to differentiate arbitrary individuals not in the training set, I think you'd need a lot more data. It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison since different models are trained on different datasets, but nonetheless note the significant gain in accuracy of DeepFace and VGGFace over OpenFace, despite having slightly fewer individuals in the training set... it seems that it's the number of photos (as well as model differences) that's making the difference, and maybe that 0.6M (600,000) photos just isn't enough for this domain.

Colorization of grayscale images is a simple task for the human imagination. Researchers from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and University of Chicago developed a fully automatic image colorization system using deep learning and GPUs. Their paper mentions previous approaches required some level of user input. Using a TITAN X GPU, they trained their deep neural network to predict hue and chroma distributions for each pixel given its hypercolumn descriptor. The predicted distributions then determine color assignment at test time.

Musk is a mad scientist unrestrained because the federal government has yet to implement Federal Motor Vehicle Safety standards requiring performance standards of new autonomous vehicles. This psycho-killer is the poster child for why we need rules for the cars before they hit the roads, not a 15 point check list that could be turned in to regulators on a toilet paper roll right now.

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." In 1964, the Supreme Court overturned an obscenity conviction against Nico Jacobellis, a Cleveland theater manager accused of distributing obscene material. The film in question was Louis Malle's "The Lovers," starring Jeanne Moreau as a French housewife who, bored with her media-mogul husband and her polo-playing sidepiece, packs up and leaves after a hot night with a younger man. And by "hot," I mean a lot of artful blocking, heavy breathing and one fleeting nipple -- basically, nothing you can't see on cable TV.

Weber Shandwick's report AI-Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence here we come!, released this week, shows that top global marketers believe AI will have an even bigger impact on comms than social media. Gorkana asks Weber and other agencies, including Firefly, Hotwire PR and Babel, what they think about the AI'revolution'. According to Weber Shandwick's report, AI is defined as the following: "[AI] is a field of technology designed to create computers, machines and software that are as smart as humans, and which are able to perform the same tasks that normally require human intelligence." It surveyed 150 chief marketing officers across the UK, US and China and more than half of them (55%) expect AI to have'a greater impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had'. Nearly six in ten (58%) of respondents believe that within the next five years companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed. Furthermore, 68% of the CMOs reported that their company is currently selling, using or planning for business in the AI area.

Much of the internet appears to be broken. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter. Dyn runs domain name servers or DNS. They work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information.

Halloween is believed to be a time when the spirits of the dead roam the earth, and so we decorate our homes with macabre items and wear costumes to fool them and scare them away. By extension, it seems like scary movies, with their projection of unholy images and sound, could serve to keep ne'er-do-well ghouls out of our living rooms (and their paws off our popcorn). Or maybe such movies just give us a fittingly chilling thrill at this most sinister time of the year. Whatever your motivation, we've got 13 (in honor of a witches coven) superb examples of the horror genre that will add some grisly grins to your holiday. All are represented for your enjoyment. I know it's hard to believe, but this sixth movie in the Child's Play slasher series is actually surprisingly well made. Don Mancini, who wrote the screenplay for the original Child's Play (1988), takes on directing duties and brings the series back to its roots.

The largest actors union in Hollywood officially called a strike early Friday morning against several prominent video game companies after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on an increase in compensation for performers who do voice-over and motion-capture work for popular games. SAG-AFTRA said Friday the work stoppage began at 12:01 a.m. Friday and covers games made by the companies that went into production after Feb. 17, 2015. Many of the most sophisticated games take years to develop and bring to market, and employ large casts of actors over that development process. Members of SAG-AFTRA are planning to picket one of the companies -- Electronic Arts -- at its location in Playa Vista on Monday.

Japanese team plans AI medical supercomputer to rival Watson Dr. Watson, your Japanese brother should be arriving soon. An artificial intelligence system that can accurately diagnose a patient and suggest the best treatment is being developed by Kyoto University and Fujitsu Ltd. The hope is that it will emulate IBM's Watson supercomputer, which is famed for AI use in medicine using a big data system, and is named after Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, rather than Sherlock Holmes' sidekick. The new system will analyze the genetic codes of patients to make its assessments. To run different simulations on relationships between diseases and a number of genes with integrated various data, it will be fed databases of worldwide medical records as well as gene information.