As one of the most in-demand voice-over actors in Hollywood, Phil LaMarr has worked on a slew of prominent video games, including the "Metal Gear" and "Star Wars" series, last year's "Mortal Kombat X" and the "Injustice" superhero games. The former "MADtv" cast member has experienced some of the physical perils that come with this burgeoning segment of the acting profession. He once worked on a "Terminator 3" game where he was required to shout and scream, and "threw my voice out in under 30 minutes," LaMarr recalled. More recently, he performed a motion-capture role on a game in which he was asked to dangle from a scaffolding. The production, which he declined to name, lacked a stunt coordinator who could ensure his safety.

"Although remarkable progress has been made in the field of computer vision, the vast majority of both these theories and technologies have yet to transition to the real automotive world, where you have a huge variety of road infrastructure, side buildings, road signs, vehicles, and most importantly, human driving behaviors," stated Nexar co-founder and CTO, Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz. "At Nexar, we've assembled a first class technical team dedicated to propelling the automotive industry into the future using deep learning. Alongside fellow industry leaders participating in the BDD Consortium, the Nexar team will apply its rapidly expanding data network and industry know-how to infuse state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for the optimal and safest driving experience." Since its launch in February 2016, Nexar has tracked upwards of 20 million miles and recorded more than a half-million instances of driving incidents worldwide. This has provided the company with a large and diverse panel of data of real-world driving conditions, a databank that continues to expand every day and serves as a vital resource for the future success of the autonomous car industry.

The Associated Press and Graphiq, which specializes in using artificial intelligence to rapidly create interactive data-driven infographics, announced a new partnership Tuesday. The partnership, whose financials were not disclosed, will make it easier for the AP to provide data infographics for its stories while exposing Graphiq to a worldwide user audience. "Today we're reaching hundreds of millions of readers a month, but the AP reaches half the world's population every day," Alex Rosenberg, Graphiq vice president, told Inc. Rosenberg noted that Graphiq will embed some of its staffers in AP newsrooms to be readily available throughout the news outlet's reporting process. The AP will also make Graphiq's entire visualization catalog--the company creates thousands of new visualizations each week--readily available to news wires' countless clients.

Explaining the difference between disruption and innovation can be tricky. Both disruption and innovation happen when something new is introduced to the market. However, disruption tends to be more violent, radically altering how we think and behave. On the other hand, innovation can be more iterative and incremental in nature. According to Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, "disruption displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient and worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative."

The value of factory production, minus the cost of raw materials and certain other expenses, reached 1.91 trillion last year, according to the Commerce Department, which uses 2009 dollars to adjust for inflation. That's a notch below the record set on the eve of the Great Recession in 2007. Factories have used robotics and computers to increase output even with fewer workers. The U.S. still produces plenty of autos, planes, steel and other metals, and large industrial machinery.

Amazon.com amzn on Wednesday launched a full-fledged music streaming service with subscriptions as low as 3.99 per month for owners of its Amazon Echo speaker, accelerating the industry trend toward more flexible pricing after years of sticking to 9.99 subscriptions. The new streaming service, called "Amazon Music Unlimited," lets users access a vast catalog of songs on demand, similar to Spotify and Apple aapl Music. Subscriptions to play music on the Echo cost 3.99 per month; for access beyond that device, subscriptions cost 7.99 a month for members of Amazon's Prime shipping and video service and 9.99 for non-members. Amazon will continue to offer Prime members a limited streaming service for free. As it plunges deeper into the crowded streaming field, Amazon is counting on the Echo, a smart speaker that responds to voice commands, to set it apart.

During the last decades more and more textual data have become available, creating a growing need to statistically analyze large amounts of textual data. The hugely popular Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model introduced by Blei et al. (2003) is a generative probability model where each document is summarized by a set of latent semantic themes, often called topics; formally, a topic is a probability distribution over the vocabulary. An estimated LDA model is therefore a compressed latent representation of the documents. LDA is a mixed membership model where each document is a mixture of topics, where each word (token) in a document belongs to a single topic. The basic LDA model is unsupervised, i.e. the topics are learned solely from the words in the documents without access to document labels. In many situations there are also other information we would like to incorporate in modeling a corpus of documents. A common example is when we have labeled documents, such as ratings of movies together with a movie description, illness category in medical journals or the location of the identified bug together with bug reports. In these situation, one can use a so called supervised topic model to find the semantic structure in the documents that are related to the class of interest. One of the first approaches to supervised topic models was proposed by Mcauliffe and Blei (2008).

After snapping up Irvine television maker Vizio in July for 2 billion in cash, Chinese tech firm LeEco made its official U.S. debut Wednesday, hosting a San Francisco news conference to spell out its ambitions to sell gadgets as varied as phones and cars. During the two-hour presentation, the company ran through nearly a dozen products it plans to launch, including a range of 4K smart TVs, the Le Pro3 and Le S3 smartphones, a virtual reality headset, a smart bicycle that can travel up to 30 mph, a video streaming service and two smart cars: the semi-autonomous LeSee and the fully autonomous LeSee Pro concept car. But the LeSee was noticeably absent from the news conference. LeEco founder Jia Yueting told the audience it got into a "serious accident" while in transit from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley. The LeSee Pro, present at the event, sat stationary on display.

Discussion[Discussion] Could Deep Learning help decrease corruption in politics? This was discovered through manual facial recognition between youtube videos. Could deep learning be used to detect faces that regularly appear in videos of protests to identify "regulars" a.k.a. I want to ask whether deep learning could help sift through the WikiLeaks emails for collusion, but that task seems far away. Can deep learning help make one turd seem more appetizing than another?