A few weeks ago we suggested you follow 5 topics that cover the more basic aspects of the business of blogging. Today let's focus on something equally important: the life of a blogger. This week I attended MMA SM2 Innovation Summit in New York, which took place during Advertising Week. The lineup of speakers did not disappoint and I gained many new insights. Here are the four that most stuck with me.

Microsoft CEO says he wants to democratise artificial intelligence. MICROSOFT CEO Satya Nadella says the software giant is hellbent on ensuring the democratisation of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, or machine intelligence, currently covers a broad range of somewhat modest capabilities in commercial technology such as voice recognition chatbots like Apple's Siri. When considering its ultimate potential some have famously described the pursuit of AI as summoning the demon but regardless of any fatalistic concerns for humankind, the pursuit of AI represents the most heated competition in the tech sector right now and holds the promise of unprecedented power. "We have set ourselves the goal of democratising AI," Mr Nadella told the audience during the keynote address at Microsoft's Ignite conference Tuesday morning AEST.

Le Holdings Ltd., better known commercially as LeEco, has announced the Oct. 19 launch date of its products in San Francisco, California. The China-based manufacturer will be expanding its services in the U.S. by making its streaming service and other hardware products available in the country. The company was formerly known as LeTV and was initially a Netflix-like streaming service in China. Over the past few years, the company has progressed to making its own hardware, like TVs and smartphones. The company even unveiled its own self-driving car concept back in April.

It's official: Lady Gaga is playing the Super Bowl. The pop star will headline the halftime show at Super Bowl 51 early next year, NFL and halftime sponsor Pepsi announced on Thursday ahead of a game between the Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals. The reveal comes weeks after reports surfaced that the singer, who is gearing up to release a new album next month, was in talks for the gig. She performed at this year's game as well, opening the event with a Broadway-worthy rendition of the national anthem. Speculation of who the NFL was eyeing for the gig heated up over the summer after Adele told fans during one of her sold-out shows at Staples Center that she had turned down the offer.

Tl;dr - has this idea about neural network architecture, similar to autoencoders, been developed already? Correct me if I'm wrong about anything, but this is my understanding so far: Autoencoders purposefully have an information bottleneck in the middle, and this bottleneck is what forces the network to learn high level representations of the input data. Otherwise, without the bottleneck, the network may discover that the optimal connection is one that is roughly equivalent to directly mapping each input to its corresponding output. However, because that bottleneck exists, it is very unlikely that an autoencoder could perform a perfect reconstruction of the input. Contrast this with other encoding, like DCT as used by JPEG images.

The FCC delayed a vote scheduled Thursday on Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed rule to require pay TV services to offer their programming on streaming apps. "We have made tremendous progress and we share the goal of creating a more innovative and inexpensive market for these consumer devices," said a statement from Wheeler and Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel. "We are still working to resolve the remaining technical and legal issues and we are committed to unlocking the set-top box for consumers across this country." Wheeler's proposal is aimed at giving pay TV consumers access to the programming they pay for every month without a cable box. Cable companies argued that the proposal exceeded the commission's legal authority and was an example of government overreach into the pay TV industry.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have announced they are forming a non-for-profit organisation to educate the public about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as well as alleviate anxieties around its application. The collective, which includes Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind, also plans to develop best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field of AI. The organisation, called Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), will address legal and ethical challenges that AI presents, encourage public discourse, and identify opportunities to use AI to bring improvements to society. The organisation does not intend to be a regulatory body, with a statement saying it does "not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies." Members of the Partnership on AI will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology.

You might want to sit down. Cartoon Network, where in 2010 Pendleton Ward's strange and beautiful creation came to regularly scheduled life, has announced its departure. Production will shut down after completion of the ninth season -- we are currently in the eighth -- though in the special chronology of animation, you will be seeing, as the news release puts it, "new episodes, mini-series, specials and more" into 2018, for a career total of "142 half-hours of content." Will it end with a "proper" ending? The Land of Ooo, where main characters Finn and Jake's post-apocalyptic adventures take place – it is the merriest post-apocalypse you ever will see, though not without its dark side -- is so thoroughly realized that it seems to have existed before Ward thought it up and will continue to exist once the show is done.

At the age of 80, Woody Allen has written, directed and is starring in his first television series, "Crisis in Six Scenes," made for Amazon and available to stream in its entirety beginning Friday. As may be said of Allen's remarkably prolific and long-lived film career, it has its better and worse, its sharper and duller points; but as the work that has returned Elaine May to public view, it can only be welcomed, with rose petals and trumpets. And it does well by her. He wrote for television before making his name as a stand-up comedian; was a familiar talk and variety show guest once that name was made; made two semi-topical specials, "Woody Allen Looks at 1967" and "Woody Allen Looks at 1969" for NBC; directed and acted in a 1994 TV adaptation of his 1966 play "Don't Drink the Water"; and acted opposite Peter Falk in a 1996 version of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys." But this is something new from him.

It takes only about 90 seconds for "Marvel's Luke Cage," the latest Netflix series set in the Marvel Comics universe, to address the idea of what it means to be a hero in the black community. The drama opens at a barbershop in Harlem run by Pop (Frankie Faison), a kind of neighborhood patriarch. The lively conversation has turned to a sign on the wall listing the few highly accomplished, widely revered men -- Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jordan -- eligible for free haircuts at the establishment. Little do most of them know that Luke Cage (Mike Colter), the quietly intense guy sweeping up hair in the corner, has the potential to join this hallowed club (that is, if there were any hair on his head to cut). Thanks to a medical experiment gone awry, Luke has been gifted with superhuman strength and bulletproof skin but would rather fly under the radar than harness his powers for good.