Netflix has released hundreds of Originals and plans to spend $8 billion over the next year on content. Creators of these stories pour their hearts and souls into turning ideas into joy for our viewers. The sublime art of doing this well is hard to describe, but it necessitates a careful orchestration of creative, business and technical decisions. Here we will focus on the latter two -- business & technical decisions like planning budgets, finding locations, building sets, and scheduling guest actors that enable the creative act of connecting with viewers. Each production is a mountain of operational and logistical challenges that consumes and produces tremendous amounts of data.

SEATTLE, April 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Applexus Technologies, a full-service business and technology solutions company based in the Seattle area, announced the launch of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice to provide AI software and services to clients. The newly launched team is part of Applexus Product and Innovation. The new practice supports a wide variety of AI services and solutions, through custom and packaged solutions, using emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and big data analysis. The Applexus Chief Technologist and AI practice leader is Dr. Thomas Koickal, one of the longest-serving global practitioners of machine learning based technologies. His career of more than 20 years has included work at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, a research center of the Indian Space Research Organization.

This article originally appeared in Vulture. When the first trailer arrived for Isle of Dogs last fall, I had three immediate, consecutive reactions: One: Oh, no. Two: Wait, I take that back. I'm going to be a good critic and reserve judgement until the week of March 23. In the week since Isle of Dogs' initial limited release, a measured, varied, and nuanced discussion about Wes Anderson's use of Japanese culture--and other cultures in general--has happened in fits and starts.

The artificial intelligence boom has expanded into creative fields once deemed uniquely human, like music, poetry, and even narrative podcasts. AI has also started writing rudimentary news articles and assisting reporters, but a new startup launched Wednesday says it will use AI to publish breaking news about a wide variety of topics. The site is called "Knowhere," and its creators say that they believe AI can be used to write unbiased news. The site will publish three versions of every article, aggregated from right-, left-, and center-leaning websites. "Fake news, the Russia misinformation scandal, and all of these issues that are at the top of the Zeitgeist at the moment are all symptoms of a fundamental problem that information moves too fast and at too large a scale for us to be able to reliably parse it and understand the world as human beings," Knowhere editor-in-chief and cofounder Nathaniel Barling and told me on the phone.

Despite its status as the world's most valuable firm, Apple has for some time been thought to lag its biggest rivals in developing one of today's most valued technologies. In the artificial intelligence (AI) battle, it still looks a relative weakling next to the likes of Amazon and Google. No wonder that when Light Reading polled readers in February, asking them what Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) should spend its billions on, the most popular response was artificial intelligence and machine learning. But Apple this week may have found a far less costly way of closing the AI gap. Rather than splurging billions on touted AI startups, it has poached one of the smartest AI experts from one of its main competitors. According to a report from the New York Times (NYT), the executive in question is none other than John Giannandrea, the head of search and artificial intelligence for Google.

We conduct a large-scale study of language models for chord prediction. Specifically, we compare N-gram models to various flavours of recurrent neural networks on a comprehensive dataset comprising all publicly available datasets of annotated chords known to us. This large amount of data allows us to systematically explore hyper-parameter settings for the recurrent neural networks---a crucial step in achieving good results with this model class. Our results show not only a quantitative difference between the models, but also a qualitative one: in contrast to static N-gram models, certain RNN configurations adapt to the songs at test time. This finding constitutes a further step towards the development of chord recognition systems that are more aware of local musical context than what was previously possible.

Lets talk about the coolest tech there is: Artificial Intelligence. It may be the stuff of futuristic movies, but AI is here and now. We might not quite be at the'I, Robot' stage just yet, but we're getting there with self-driving cars and smart homes. This is all assuming we're not already in The Matrix of course. The idea of machines learning is an immensely exciting concept, and increasingly it's driving the way the world around us operates.

The long-anticipated, Steven Spielberg-helmed Ready Player One has just been released in UK cinemas this week, and as a film of obvious interest to DreamingRobots and Cyberselves everywhere, we went along to see what the Maestro of the Blockbuster has done with Ernest Cline's 2011 novel (which the author himself helped to adapt to the screen). A one-time viewing and a next-day review are, of course, too early to answer such big questions with any certainty. Fortunately, however you feel about the film itself, it will reward many multiple viewings on DVD as even the most unsatisfied viewer won't be able to resist pausing the action frame-by-frame to catch all the references and fleeting glimpses of their favourite video game characters of the past. Cline's original novel was very much a paean to plucky independent gamers resisting the ruthless greed and world-conquering ambition of the Corporate Villain (while simultaneously, strangely, lionising the richest and most world-conquering of them all, James Halliday, the Gates-Jobs figure transformed here into the benevolent deus ex machina that built his trillions on creating the OASIS). The film remains true to Cline's vision, and perhaps even heightens this black-and-white, goodie-versus-baddie (IOI), with a brilliantly cast Ben ('Commander Krennic') Mendelsohn and a tragically under-used Hannah John-Kamen heading an army of faceless corporate infantry.

I have the original Amazon Echo (the tall one), a 2nd generation (the squat one) and recently purchased an Echo Dot (2nd generation) along with a Bluetooth speaker that I bought specifically to use with it, so I thought it time to post a review comparing the two full size versions against the experience of the Dot. First, as we all know, the Dot has small, tinny speakers which are the equivalent of what you would get from playing on a mobile phone... all fine and as advertised as you can either connect external speakers via Bluetooth or wired. Dependant on what you attach to it you can get audio which could potentially be better than the built-in speakers of the full size devices. What I didn't appreciate was that if you have multiple Echos and are hoping to use the Multi-room audio functionality, if any of your Echos are connected via Bluetooth to an external speaker then the music will not play on that speaker but will revert to the speaker on the Echo itself. I spent an hour thinking I'd set things up incorrectly or the Bluetooth speaker was at fault before I realised.

The Spotify banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that the music streaming service begins trading shares, on April 3, 2018 in New York City. The question now is: Where to? The Spotify banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that the music streaming service begins trading shares, on April 3, 2018 in New York City. The question now is: Where to? Following its successful public listing yesterday, the music streaming service Spotify is now worth around $25 billion, making it the largest music company in the world -- but when Spotify first débuted, back in 2008, it was reasonable to think it would fail. Headquartered in Sweden, a country whose recording industry had shrunk to a third of its previous size due to piracy, the company was located far from the Silicon Valley sphere of influence.