Artificial intelligence helps profits surge at Shop Direct Very.co.uk generated sales of more than 1 billion for the first time as parent company Shop Direct announced a 44 per cent increase in profits before tax. Liverpool-based Shop Direct grew underlying profit to 150.4 million as sales increased by 4.3 per cent to 1.86bn. The 12-month period to June 30 represented its first full financial year as a pureplay digital retailer, having ceased catalogue production in January 2015. The group, which also operates digital department stores VeryExclusive.co.uk, That was realised on the back of new features such as push notifications and touch ID to its MyVery app, which is nearing a million downloads.

In the latest episode of #CoffeeWithAGoogler met with Christine Robson of Google's Machine Learning teams. We spoke about what was new and exciting in the realm of Machine Learning, including Project Magenta. We see how Magenta came up with a machine-generated piece of music, and how some artists jammed along with it! In this piece of music, we trained the model using the first four notes of'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', and using a recurrent neural network, trained with everything from the Beatles to Bach, it came up with the tune. Listen to a great conversation with an expert on Machine Learning -- where Christine steps us through some pretty advanced concepts, but makes it so clear that even I could understand it!

"Empower bottom-up innovation and amazing things will happen." He was responsible for one of those amazing things: a way to help Spotify users discover new music called Discover Weekly. This tool launched about a year ago; it now has 40 million users and is helping to build the careers of new artists. Newett joined Spotify in 2013, initially working on a team developing a web page with personalized information, news about artists, album releases, and local concerts, along with a recommender system that offered suggestions of albums a user might find appealing. The recommendation feature, Newett recalled, seemed like a good idea, but wasn't heavily used.

I guess it could be an older version, but here's a single PDF: https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/

Warner Brothers has taken its piracy policing to the extreme by reporting its own website. Warner also asked Google to remove links to film streaming sites run by Amazon and Sky, as well online film reference site IMDB. Warner regularly reports pirated content to the search engine company, but the latest round of take-down requests appears to be full of legitimate websites, including its own. The official Warner Bros web page for 2008's The Dark Knight was among the URLs that Google was asked to remove. Several requests were also made in relation to the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, again including Warner's official site for the movie.

Long ago, as the crew of the Enterprise explored the final frontier, one man boldly did what few--if any--actors had ever done before: construct a language from scratch. But while James Doohan (Scotty) may have invented a form of Klingon on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the real credit for its enduring legacy goes to linguist Marc Okrand, who started developing Klingon for Trek films in 1984, bringing constructed languages ("conlangs") to generations of new enthusiasts, from Trekkers to Dune fans to Na'vi admirers. People constructed languages before Klingon: J.R.R. Tolkien created Quenya in 1915, later used in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; Edgar Rice Burroughs invented Barsoomian in 1912 for A Princess of Mars; St. Hildegard of Bingen fashioned the Lingua Ignota in 1200, crediting some angels for divine inspiration. But as part of a TV show beloved by millions of viewers, Okrand's Klingon brought conlangs to the popular lexicon. Much of Klingon's appeal comes from its lexical novelty.

The end of work-as-we-know-it, and radical longevity: The imminent clash between technology and humanity is already rushing towards us. What moral values are you prepared to stand up for--before being human alters its meaning forever? This is not me saying this. This is Gerd Leonhard a new kind of futurist schooled in the humanities as much as in technology. A musician by origin, Gerd connects left and right brains for a 360-degree coverage of the multiple futures that present themselves at any one time.

If you haven't heard about it yet, there's a new sci-fi thriller movie coming called Morgan, which focuses on a robot with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that -- to no surprise -- rebels against its human creators. Appropriately, movie studio 20th Century Fox turned to IBM's Watson, a supercomputer AI capable of analyzing human personalities and emotions, researching cancer, and powering self-driving busses, to create its own version of the film's trailer. While the AI in Morgan quickly learns new abilities to use against human and subsequently goes out of control, IBM researchers first needed to teach Watson about movie trailers. They did this by feeding it over 100 horror movie trailers that were cut into different scenes and moments, and then allowing Watson to perform analyses on aspects such as visuals, sound, and composition in order to understand what makes up a trailer and what viewers find scary. After this, Watson was given the full movie Morgan to dissect, and managed to come up with six minutes of video featuring 10 scenes.

IBM used its artificial intelligence platform Watson to create a movie trailer for the film Morgan, a tale of the fate of an artificially created human. The IBM team worked with 20th Century Fox, it said. John R. Smith, IBM Fellow, Manager, Multimedia and Vision, said in a blog: "How do you create a movie trailer about an artificially enhanced human? Fox wanted to explore using artificial intelligence (AI) to create a horror movie trailer that would keep audiences on the edge of their seats." It could have been generated using Artificial Intelligence.

While many of the different works on artificial intelligence (A.I.) focus on improving the quality of human life and easing the burden on people for certain tasks, the threat of machines taking over our jobs is nothing new. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution that brings fancy concepts like Internet of Things (IoT) or Big Data to the traditional industrial facilities in order to embrace unprecedented automation opportunities, more and more blue collar workers are faced with the unemployment threat. But judging by the way things are going, robots will not stop at factories. Another traditional profession, news reporting, is also under near threat of A.I. and the reason for this is very simple: Machines love categorical information. If it is possible to put every piece of data in order on an Excel spreadsheet, no matter how complex it is, then A.I. is perfectly capable of analyzing and producing meaningful information from this sheet.