Scientists at SONY CSL Research Laboratory have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence: "Daddy's Car" and "Mister Shadow". The researchers have developed FlowMachines, a system that learns music styles from a huge database of songs. "Mister Shadow" is composed in the style of American songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter. French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics. The two songs are excerpts of albums composed by Artificial Intelligence to be released in 2017.

Online publisher Defy Media, which attracts millions of young adults and teenagers to such goofy information, announced last week that it picked up 70 million from investors. And it's planning to spend most of that on increasing content production, and for the first time, advertising itself. "As the success grew over 2016, people got more and more bullish on the business and we got the outcome we wanted," Defy Media President Keith Richman said about the funding, led by Wellington Management Co. The New York City start-up, which has a significant base in Los Angeles, publishes articles and videos through online brands including Smosh and Clevver. Licensing videos to streaming apps from companies such as Verizon and Comcast brings in the rest of the cash.

Usually, host Rose Eveleth spends Flash Forward imagining a future made possible by new paradigms, like universal body-hacking or telepathy. This week, though, she gave the creative responsibilities to a recurrent neural network, who offered up a script based on every previous episode of her podcast, plus The War of the Worlds and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio play. As a result, Eveleth speculates about two futures: a post-apocalyptic world where witches go to space, and our possible future where AI regularly create our entertainment.

No doubt, this is the best-known line from Mario Puzo's book, The Godfather (1969) and the Oscar-award winning film of the same title (1972). Perhaps it may be one of the best-known lines in any film and ranks second only to "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" as the most celebrated quotation from an American film. Of course, the'offer' here is "do as I say or I'll kill you"… Corleone's preferred method of intimidating those around him and assuring that he gets exactly what he wants in an expeditious fashion. So you may be asking, what does this famous gangster line have to do with the fast emerging field of "bots" – software applications that run automated tasks and scripts over the Internet. Quite frankly, some people have a healthy fear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the potential for unintended consequences of a future where machines have taken control of the world and reign over humans (think about the plot of The Matrix or The Terminator). So the purpose of this blog is to take a deeper look at the current state of AI applications on the Internet and to some extent, demystify what is going on with bots.

Our spandex-clad saviors rule movies. They even appear in comics occasionally. Yet some of the most interesting stories about caped crusaders right now don't come with pictures or fancy special effects. They're in good old fashioned books. A new wave of authors is bringing fun, romance, and a spirit of adventure to superheroes--and they're doing it by focusing on the sorts of saviors big-budget tentpole movies tend to overlook.

Around midnight one Saturday in January, Sarah Jeong was on her couch, browsing Twitter, when she spontane ously wrote what she now bitterly refers to as "the tweet that launched a thousand ships." The 28-year-old journalist and author of The Internet of Garbage, a book on spam and online harassment, had been watching Bernie Sanders boosters attacking feminists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. In what was meant to be a hyper bolic joke, she tweeted out a list of political carica tures, one of which called the typical Sanders fan a "vitriolic crypto racist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women." The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd--she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that's all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to "rip each one of [her] hairs out" and "twist her tits clear off." The attacks continued for weeks. "I was in crisis mode," she recalls.

For this edition focused on TV content, we're very happy to be hosted at ProSiebenSat.1. They will sponsor the venue, the food and the drinks! As there will be a security check at the entrance I'd like to kindly ask everyone to register on this Eventbrite page so I have a master list of names. IF YOUR NAME IS NOT ON THE LIST YOU WON'T GET IN. So make sure to register, pretty please.

This approach tends to teach to machines what humans like to listen to, without understanding what is recommended. It is a deaf approach that's trying to mimic the record dealer's behavior. It's not a DJ that builds a listening experience. It doesn't capture what the soundtrack of your life is. Collaborative filtering also tends to make predictable and familiar recommendations. This favors the rise of a popular artist dictatorship, harmful for the beautiful versatility of music.

Rami Malek won the Outstanding Drama Actor award at the 2016 Emmys for his performance as Elliot Alderson on "Mr. It was the actor's first time to be nominated. While the actor is most popularly known for his role as the hacker-activist Elliot, there are many things about Malek that people will surely find as fascinating as the character he plays onscreen. Here are a few of them. Malek has a twin named Sami, who works as a teacher. Rami is the older twin by four minutes. It was just for one episode, and he only had three lines. Rami played one of Lane's (Keiko Agena) bible study group peers in Season 4, Episode 11, titled "In the Clamor and the Clangor," of the WB show. Rami went to the same school as Dunst, which was the Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. The actor admitted in an interview with E! News that he had a little thing for the "Fargo" actress. Rami also said that he and the actress are still friends, and his friend Garrett Hedlund is currently dating Dunst. The actor told Yahoo that he's not allergic to all kinds of cats, but when he told the production team behind "Mr.

The USA series Mr. Robot has more than just surprisingly realistic hacking scenes, as it now can claim an Emmy win. Series star Rami Malek snagged the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series award tonight, beating out Kevin Spacey, Bob Odenkirk and others. After double checking to make sure we were all seeing this too (good call), Malek said he wanted to "honor the Elliots...because there's a little bit of Elliot in all of us." The show's season finale airs Wednesday night, and if the breakdown of its hacking scenes hasn't turned you into a fan yet, take a look at our interviews with show creator Sam Esmail. Other notable winners include Tatiana Maslany's Lead Actress in a Drama win for her multiple Orphan Black characters (14 at last count), a writing award for Aziz Ansari's Master of None Netflix series, and a pair of Emmys for Amazon Prime's Transparent.