Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture.

Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. Female representation in Hollywood still lags far behind --women made up only 34 percent of speaking characters in top-grossing films last year, while the number of female leads has, in fact, recently fallen--but Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny have the reins of this $55 million Paramount project, while Oscar Isaac, the film's most significant male character, takes the supporting role of imperilled love interest to a take-action female hero. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture. But it's less unusual when you narrow the focus to science fiction, where women have recently been taking the lead on-screen. Garland's sophomore effort as writer-director follows his own Ex Machina, plus such sizable productions as Arrival, Gravity, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Cloverfield Paradox, Colossal, Okja, and The Shape of Water, in putting a woman or women at the forefront of a science-fiction narrative.

Artificial intelligence research has been around for more than half a century, but only in recent years have we seen developments in AI technology that might bring sci-fi film plotlines to life. Merriam-Webster defines AI as "a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers" and "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior." Today, the more benign uses of AI include software that scans thousands of job applicant resumes in minutes – saving recruiters countless hours of manual screening – and AI algorithms that review patient X-rays and CT scans to highlight potential findings for radiologists. But even the beneficial aspects of AI – increased efficiency and accuracy – portend an increasingly automated job market in which some workers will continue to see their positions replaced by machines. Some of the more nefarious applications of AI have been the stuff of Hollywood movies for years – like the prospect of widespread death and destruction caused by unmanned autonomous weapons designed to make lethal decisions.

Hashtag creator Chris Messina today launched Molly, a service that allows people to ask questions about you and glean information from your various social media profiles. Molly skims your posts on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Medium to learn about you and formulate natural language questions. When someone asks something Molly can't answer, that question is sent to the Molly app for you to answer yourself. In addition to following your social media activity, the Molly app asks you to answer questions about yourself, like "Do you own an Amazon Echo?" or "Do you have a sweet tooth or a savory tooth?" The more you swipe through the questions, the more Molly learns about you, and the more you learn about how your friends have answered similar questions.

Last fall, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos charged his company's studio division to produce bigger shows with a "global appeal," in an attempt to compete with other streaming video companies in the race to produce high-end original content. Since then, Amazon has moved quickly to begin developing an impressive slate of genre television shows that include adaptations of novels such as Ringworld, Snow Crash, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Now, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Amazon has acquired the rights to another huge book: Consider Phlebas, the first installment of Iain M. Banks's space opera Culture series. THR reports that Amazon will partner with British screenwriter Dennis Kelly (who created the critically acclaimed Channel 4 series Utopia), and that should the scripts for the series work out, it will order it directly to a series. By acquiring big-name franchises such as Lord of the Rings, while facing intense competition from companies like Netflix, Apple, and Disney, it's clear that Amazon is working to aggressively pursue major projects that play with complicated stories.

Alphabet Inc's Google is betting this combination proves irresistible with the Tuesday launch of Google Clips, a pocket-sized digital camera that decides on its own whether an image is interesting enough to shoot. The $249 device, which is designed to clip onto furniture or other fixed objects, automatically captures subjects that wander into its viewfinder. But unlike some trail or security cameras that are triggered by motion or programmed on timers, Clips is more discerning. Google has trained its electronic brain to recognize smiles, human faces, dogs, cats and rapid sequences of movement. The $249 device, which is designed to clip onto furniture or other fixed objects, automatically captures subjects that wander into its viewfinder.

Mujoco is mostly a physics engine, and I'm willing to bet that whatever parts you're thinking of when you say it's "more" than a physics engine either exist in some form in Bullet and the rest, or aren't relevant for RL. The things you listed are engines that delegate to other projects for their physics simulation, and come with a ton of heavyweight baggage that you don't need to do RL.

Google's new camera, called Clips, is a small, intriguing device that feels experimental. It's a camera, but it has no screen to compose or view images. It comes with a case that has a clip, but it's not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own. Google intends this roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera to be used by specific audiences--parents or pet-owners--who are interested in capturing a certain kind of scene: the candid moments when a child (or dog) does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smartphone and open an app.

The goal of music highlight extraction is to get a short consecutive segment of a piece of music that provides an effective representation of the whole piece. In a previous work, we introduced an attention-based convolutional recurrent neural network that uses music emotion classification as a surrogate task for music highlight extraction, for Pop songs. The rationale behind that approach is that the highlight of a song is usually the most emotional part. This paper extends our previous work in the following two aspects. First, methodology-wise we experiment with a new architecture that does not need any recurrent layers, making the training process faster. Moreover, we compare a late-fusion variant and an early-fusion variant to study which one better exploits the attention mechanism. Second, we conduct and report an extensive set of experiments comparing the proposed attention-based methods against a heuristic energy-based method, a structural repetition-based method, and a few other simple feature-based methods for this task. Due to the lack of public-domain labeled data for highlight extraction, following our previous work we use the RWC POP 100-song data set to evaluate how the detected highlights overlap with any chorus sections of the songs. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods over competing methods. For reproducibility, we open source the code and pre-trained model at https://github.com/remyhuang/pop-music-highlighter/.

Automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made the healthcare industry more efficient and sustainable. Not only it improves the recovery time with no postoperative complications in patients but also eases off the work of a surgeon.