On Election Day, journalists at The Washington Post will get an assist from their non-human counterparts. The newspaper announced Wednesday morning that it will use automation to cover 500 races. The automation technology, Heliograf, was first used by The Post to cover the Rio Olympics and will be repurposed to provide "up-to-date reporting, analysis and results for nearly 500 races." In addition, the Post will surface stories based on the readers' location. In August, Washington Post Director of Strategic Initiatives told Poynter that Heliograf wasn't aimed at replacing human reporters -- rather, it's intended to be a complementary service aimed at freeing up reporters and editors to cover more nuanced stories.

AI-powered voice interfaces have given rise to a new class of devices competing to supplant our phones. There are friendly wireless speakers in our kitchens and helpful digital passengers in our cars. Among the most promising are in-ear computers--wireless earbuds that operate as always-on, voice-controlled Internet communication gateways. We humans already wear headphones everywhere, and in the long stretches when we're not barking at Siri, we're listening to music or podcasts. But if the idea of in-ear computers is going to take off, the companies that make them have to figure out what happens when you shut off Spotify.

Pixar founder George Lucas might have given the world the word "Droid" before he sold the company to Apple's Steve Jobs but now Apple CEO Tim Cook is making no secret of the fact that he wants the company to play its part in bringing Artificial Intelligence to the world. This week he's been spilling at least some of the beans on Apple's plans for AI, although his vision seems more connected to machine learning rather than the AI technologies that would help to bring droids like C3PO and R2D2. "We see AI as being horizontal in nature and running across all our platforms and products," said Cook, following on to say, "we see it being used in ways that most people don't even think about." That sounds grandoise – and, at first sight, it sounds like they have something amazing up their sleeves. So just what kind of unexpected use cases was he talking about?

Biren Gandhi sees Cisco as the torchbearer of drone digital disruption. The flying machines have become mainstream tools for everything from delivery services to video usage. So how can the networking giant--normally known for Internet services, solutions, software and hardware--compete in the unmanned aviation realm? As the world narrows in on artificial intelligence, machines and virtual reality, Cisco too pushes to participate in innovative technology-- and Gandhi is at the helm of this innovation, along with his Cisco "co-conspirators" Nico Darrow and Angelo Fienga. Known as "Cisco's Drone Specialist" but more formally titled Distinguished Strategist, Gandhi speaks at conferences like InterDrone, XPONENTIAL, The Commercial UAV Show, etc. about how the company is moving forward with drone security, collaboration, and infrastructure.

Compared to Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google, Apple's AI research projects have been largely inscrutable. But now, that looks like it's about to change. Apple has hired esteemed Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Russ Salakhutdinov as its director of artificial intelligence research, with plans to build a team of researchers for the company in the coming months. Salakhutdinov will remain in his post as an associate professor at CMU, Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my team https://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

Chris Baker is managing director of UK Enterprise at Concur. What reactions did people have to the movie trailer for Morgan (which was created entirely -- and for the first time -- by an AI bot, and a pretty famous one at that)? Which is a fair reaction. Computers can now write, read, learn and speak. And for some, this is pretty scary -- people are terrified that bots will snatch their jobs and eventually take over the world and render humans useless (films like I, Robot haven't helped this).

In the matrix completion problem, we seek to recover or estimate a matrix, when only a fraction of its entries are observed. While it is impossible to complete an arbitrary matrix using only partial observations of its entries, it may be possible to fully recover matrix entries when the matrix has an appropriate underlying structure. For example, most low-rank matrices can be completed accurately with high probability, by solving a convex optimization problem (Candés and Recht, 2009). Consequently, algorithms for lowrank matrix completion have enjoyed widespread use across many disciplines, including collaborative filtering and recommender systems (Koren et al., 2009), multi-task learning and classification (Amit et al., 2007; Argyriou et al., 2007; Wu and Lange, 2015), computer vision (Chen and Suter, 2004), statistical genetics (Chi et al., 2013), as well as remote sensing (Malek-Mohammadi et al., 2014). In this paper, we consider matrix completion under a structural assumption that is closely related to the low-rank assumption; i.e., we assume that the matrix entries vary "smoothly" with respect to a graphical organization of the rows and columns. For example, in the context of a movie recommendation system, we seek to complete a user-by-movies ratings matrix. We may have additional information about users, such as if pairs of users are friends on a social media application, as well as additional information from a movie database, such as the co-occurrence of certain film principles. We expect the entries of a movie ratings matrix to vary "smoothly" over a neighborhood of users, defined by a friendship graph, and over a neighborhood of movies, defined by a shared movie principles graph. When such local similarity structure exists, and is available, it behooves us to leverage this information to predict missing entries in a matrix.

Amazon may soon be adding'internet service provider' to its long list of skills. People familiar with the matter revealed the eCommerce giant is considering this service, first for its European customers. This new venture would let Amazon bundle internet access with its Prime video streaming, which would ultimately increase its membership base. People familiar with the matter revealed the eCommerce giant is considering this service for its European customers. A person briefed on the discussion told The Information that Amazon is considering offering internet access to its European customers.

Updated 10-18-16: We've updated our recommendation for best Phablet (5.5 inches or greater) to the excellent Pixel XL. We haven't yet reviewed the standard-size Pixel, but one of the two is a likely candidate for best overall phone. The Android universe is teeming with options, from super-expensive flagship phones, to affordable models that make a few calculated compromises, to models expressly designed for, say, great photography. Chances are that whichever phone you buy, you'll keep it for at least two years. So choosing the best Android phone for you isn't a decision you should take lightly.

Why is it that every time humans develop a really clever computer system in the movies, it seems intent on killing every last one of us at its first opportunity? In Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 starts off as an attentive, if somewhat creepy, custodian of the astronauts aboard the USS Discovery One, before famously turning homicidal and trying to kill them all. In The Matrix, humanity's invention of AI promptly results in human-machine warfare, leading to humans enslaved as a biological source of energy by the machines. In Daniel H. Wilson's book Robopocalypse, computer scientists finally crack the code on the AI problem, only to have their creation develop a sudden and deep dislike for its creators. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep? And you're not an especially sentient being yourself if you haven't heard the story of Skynet (see The Terminator, T2, T3, etc.) The simple answer is that -- movies like Wall-E, Short Circuit, and Chappie, notwithstanding -- Hollywood knows that nothing guarantees box office gold quite like an existential threat to all of humanity. Whether that threat is likely in real life or not is decidedly beside the point. How else can one explain the endless march of zombie flicks, not to mention those pesky, shark-infested tornadoes? The reality of AI is nothing like the movies. Siri, Alexa, Watson, Cortana -- these are our HAL 9000s, and none seems even vaguely murderous. The technology has taken leaps and bounds in the last decade, and seems poised to finally match the vision our artists have depicted in film for decades. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep, or is Hollywood running away with a tired idea? Looking back at the last decade of AI research helps to paint a clearer picture of a sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightened future. An increasing number of prominent voices are being raised about the real dangers of humanity's continuing work on so-called artificial intelligence.