The Luftwaffe would use the doodlebugs to attack London, where actress Helen Mirren's parents lived during the war. "They were by far the worst because [as Mirren's mother told her] you would hear them coming over and if you heard the drone -- the buzz up there in the sky -- if you heard that noise stop, that's when it was dropping its load," said Mirren during a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "So you would just pray it went over your head." Mirren recalled this memory from her family's history as she was promoting her movie "Eye in the Sky," in which she plays a British colonel tasked with deciding whether to use a drone strike in Nairobi, Kenya. Her character has tracked the location of an extremist meeting, but must choose whether to take out the terrorists at the cost of killing a young girl who is selling bread right outside their headquarters.

On Tuesday, June 28th we'll be exploring "The Art of AI." The evening will examine the opportunities and challenges presented when machine learning and storytelling collide. Together we'll explore the impact of AI on narrative and the role that it can play in building rich immersive storytelling experiences. Guests for the evening include The creators of Sunspring a short scripted by an AI starring Thomas Middleditch from HBO's Silicon Valley. This is a special presentation that mixes story and code in real-time.

There are plenty of toy robots on the market, but they tend to lack a real sense of personality. With scripted responses and set, repeated movements, they can be hard to love. A team of robotics engineers at Anki have attempted to create a truly loveable robot that relies on AI to give it some real personality. Cozmo is a cute little robot capable of recognizing and engaging with humans, thanks to a combination of robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision. According to Anki, Cozmo possesses the kind of personality we usually associate with robots we see in the movies.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gathering pace as one of the biggest ICT trends of our time – and the topic of "robot journalism" provides important insight on how AI is being applied to industry. How is natural language generation (NLG) being used to explain big data in narrative form that broader audiences can easily understand? What insights are being found by machines producing 2,000 articles per second? How are some of the world's biggest media agencies currently using vendors that provide these solutions to build their reach, engagement, and businesses? Will "robots" (or automated content) soon render journalists obsolete?

Tony Jebara is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and Director of Machine Learning Research at Netflix. His research intersects computer science and statistics to develop new frameworks for learning from data with applications in social networks, spatio-temporal data, vision and text. At the Deep Learning Summit in Boston, on April 2016, Tony presented'Double-Cover Inference in Deep Belief Networks'. I caught up with him to hear more about his work at Netflix and his thoughts on the recent advancements in deep learning. Tell us more about your work as Director of Machine Learning Research at Netflix.

Contagions such as the spread of popular news stories, or infectious diseases, propagate in cascades over dynamic networks with unobservable topologies. However, "social signals" such as product purchase time, or blog entry timestamps are measurable, and implicitly depend on the underlying topology, making it possible to track it over time. Interestingly, network topologies often "jump" between discrete states that may account for sudden changes in the observed signals. The present paper advocates a switched dynamic structural equation model to capture the topology-dependent cascade evolution, as well as the discrete states driving the underlying topologies. Conditions under which the proposed switched model is identifiable are established. Leveraging the edge sparsity inherent to social networks, a recursive $\ell_1$-norm regularized least-squares estimator is put forth to jointly track the states and network topologies. An efficient first-order proximal-gradient algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real cascades measured over the span of one year are conducted, and test results corroborate the efficacy of the advocated approach.

Mumbai: There is tremendous buzz around machine learning, broadly described as a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. However, despite an exponential increase in power, computers have typically proved incompetent at things that are really simple to human beings--like recognizing the dog in a picture containing a dog, or understanding speech. The trend, however, is changing. Consider'Deep Learning', which describes a collection of techniques that allow computational tasks that were previously thought impossible. Facebook Inc, for instance, uses it to identify faces, and when Google Inc recently announced that their algorithms could not only'see' a dog but also identify it as a Pomeranian, they heralded the maturity of Deep Learning techniques.

The official Mojang blog had a concrete release date for the film today: May 24, 2019. It'll release in 3D and IMAX, but that's just about all we know about the movie at this time. Vu Bui, COO of Mojang, notes that it does seem like quite a long time away, but it "just so happens to be the right amount of time to make it completely awesome" while promising "loads more" will be shared soon. Minecraft continues to be a tour-de-force, with the newly-launched Battle mini game a success and Minecraft Realms, the paid multiplayer server hosting service out there in the wild for players being introduced for mobile players. What could a movie version of Minecraft bring? We'll have to wait a few Memorial Day holidays to see.

Last year Hrayr used convolutional networks to identify spoken language from short audio recordings for a TopCoder contest and got 95% accuracy. After the end of the contest we decided to try recurrent neural networks and their combinations with CNNs on the same task. The best combination allowed to reach 99.24% and an ensemble of 33 models reached 99.67%. As before, the inputs of the networks are spectrograms of speech recordings. It seems spectrograms are the standard way to represent audio for deep learning systems (see "Listen, Attend and Spell" and "Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin").

Cozmo is a 179 artificially intelligent robot that can recognize faces and react to human gestures. SAN FRANCISCO – At first glance, the palm-sized toy on the table looks unexceptional, an odd cross between a bulldozer and a forklift. Except that the toy is snoring. Suddenly, it wakes up, motors over to its human inquisitor and lets out a happy squawk as its digital eyes go wide. Made by Anki, the start-up that has found success with its self-driving Anki Drive racing cars, Cozmo goes on sale today for 179 with orders shipping this fall.