There's a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week. Times staff writer Chris Barton offers his take on what's up and what's down in music, movies, television and just about anything else out there that is worth considering. The Westerlies: How does a four-piece trumpet and trombone instrumental combo earn raves from both indie-leaning music blogs and public radio while also performing at the Newport Jazz Festival and local rock clubs? The answer can be heard in the sprawling self-titled album due Oct. 7. Over two discs the New York City-based, Seattle-born brass band occupies a lively territory between jazz, Steven Foster-styled folk and chamber music with bracing melodies and, crucially, an undeniable sense of fun.

RAVN Systems, leading experts in Artificial Intelligence, Search and Knowledge Management solutions, announced today the launch of a RAVN ACE powered Robot for LPP (Legal Professional Privilege) review, allowing clients to automate the review of determining if material is subject to LPP. The LPP Robot uses state of the art AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques to automatically read through vast document collections, such as case material in litigation, as well as other document types, to determine whether individual items are subject to LPP. The accuracy levels achieved by the Robot making these determinations now surpass traditional manual efforts and is several orders of magnitude faster. The solution exploits supervised iterative Machine Learning models inside the RAVN ACE (Applied Cognitive Engine) platform, meaning the Robot will become more accurate over time. It is a technological leap from legacy predictive coding methods that sometimes are used today.

The new HBO show Westworld is based on the 1973 feature film of the same name. The movie, which was written and directed by Michael Crichton, explores the idea of a high-tech theme park that goes haywire, an idea Crichton later recycled in his much more famous Jurassic Park. The original Westworld has many fans, but film critic Theresa DeLucci says the new series is a major improvement in terms of quality. "It's an HBO show," DeLucci says in Episode 223 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "This definitely has that HBO pedigree of cast and acting and music and visuals." Science fiction author Rajan Khanna likes how the show draws inspiration from open world videogames like Red Dead Redemption.

Please could you argument more? Note that the main aim of the extension is to provide an interface, if your problem is with the fact that the NN implementation is a very simple one. Also note that this is not targeting computer vision problems, but mostly classifications and regressions with a limited number of input variables. Nothing prevents swapping the underlying neural network implementation with a more advanced one in the future. EDIT: However note how for the simple problems this aims to solve, which are very important business problems for websites and apps developers btw, using more powerful NNs may not make an actual difference.

The second track from the Los Angeles R&B singer Tinashe's forthcoming new album is, like much of her work, exploring odd sonic spaces that accent minimalism but have enough curlicue flair to make a clear artistic statement. A few weeks ago Tinashe released the first song, "Superlove," a chrome-toned banger, shimmering but solid. She then issued "Company," which pumps with a different kind of momentum. Produced by Tricky Stewart and Terius "the-dream" Nash, who are also responsible for massive hits by Rihanna (her breakout hit "Umbrella"), Beyoncé ("Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)") and dozens of others, it's more delicate than "Superlove." "I don't need the loving, nope/ So don't make this something" she sings at the beginning of song.

I was reading this paper and I noticed they used two layers for encoder/decoder, but up to five layers for latent variables. My question is how do you calculate loss for more than one latent later? Do you just tack an extra KL Divergence to the loss function for each additional latent layer?

The DMV's new document coincides with the release last week of a 112-page federal proposal under which any self-driving car should pass a 15-point safety assessment before the public can get ahold of it. Among other things, the safety assessment asks automakers to document how the car detects and avoids objects and pedestrians, how hardened it is against cyberattacks and what how its backup systems will cope should the software fail. In incorporating the federal approach, California dropped a proposal that a third-party company certify the safety of self-driving cars.

What kind of answer does theoretical CS want to the question "Why do neural networks work so well?" (cstheory.stackexchange.com)

Greg Linden may not be a household name, but he changed the way we interact with culture and transformed retail forever. An engineer at Amazon in the late 1990s, Linden worked on a curious problem: how to recommend books without human intervention. Until then Amazon relied on editors who wrote hundreds of reviews every year. It was a costly and time-consuming process. Automating recommendations proved trickier than anyone expected.

You will often find good/best performance using a softmax loss with 2 components, but you can also use a single binary output. Also don't be afraid to use the source code as an example and implement your own loss if you need something else - it's actually quite readable.