Police in China are now sporting glasses equipped with facial recognition devices and they're using them to scan train riders and plane passengers for individuals who may be trying to avoid law enforcement or are using fake IDs. So far, police have caught seven people connected to major criminal cases and 26 who were using false IDs while traveling, according to People's Daily. The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing-based LLVision Technology Co. developed the devices. The company produces wearable video cameras as well and while it sells those to anyone, it's vetting buyers for its facial recognition devices. LLVision says that in tests, the system was able to pick out individuals from a database of 10,000 people and it could do so in 100 milliseconds.

Google seems to be working on a subscription-based game streaming service called "Yeti," according to Wednesday report by The Information. Google could also launch a gaming console under its Made by Google department, sources familiar with the matter told the news site. The subscription game service could work on Google's Chromecast and possibly with the rumored console. The project has gone through multiple iterations, including one that would have worked with the Chromecast, the report said. The Made by Google console would heighten Google's push for centering its products in consumers' homes.

Hot on the heels of Twitter, Reddit has updated its rules to expressly ban AI-generated "deepfake" porn. Where it previously had a single rule forbidding porn and suggestive material involving minors, it now has two -- and it's clear that you're not allowed to post "depictions that have been faked." Accordingly, Reddit has cracked down on some of the offending communities. It has shut down the deepfakes subreddit that got the ball rolling, as well as YouTubefakes. It hasn't closed non-deepfake subreddits like CelebFakes, however, and it's also maintaining the communities with more innocuous intentions, such as FakeApp (the program itself) and SFWdeepfakes. At the moment, this is more about addressing the specific violations that triggered the uproar than to stamp out every potential violation of the policy.

An old episode of The Simpsons predicted how smartphones would someday need to self-correct annoying spelling mishaps on the phone's keyboard. "Lisa on Ice" – a Season 6, Episode 8 show which aired way back in 1994- opens in a Springfield Elementary School assembly where Kearney asks fellow bully Dolph to take a memo on his Newton to "Beat up Martin." When the machine translates the message into "Eat up Martha," it is signaling how common text messaging errors can be blamed on their phone's lack of autocorrect technology. By 2013, Apple had perfected the autocorrect technology for smartphone keyboards. Nitin Ganatra, Apple's former director of engineering for iOS applications, explained "If you heard people talking and they used the words Eat up Martha, it was basically a reference to the fact that we needed to nail the keyboard. We needed to make sure the text input works on this thing otherwise- Here comes the Eat up Martha's."

Visit https://www.deepfakes.club to learn how you can start using these techniques with free software. The deepfakes algorithm is not just for face-swapping but can produce visual effects that would normally be quite costly to implement. This demo showcases the mustache-removal abilities of a trained neural network. Mustachegate involved actor Henry Cavill sporting a mustache during reshoots as Superman in the film Justice League. A competing studio would not allow him to shave his mustache.

It sounds like Google might be working on a game streaming service. According to a report from The Information, the tech juggernaut has been floating the idea for a streaming service (like PlayStation Now or NVIDIA's GeForce Now) for around two years. The service is codenamed "Yeti" and Google is apparently even testing hardware for it as well. The Information's sources say that the service might stream to a Chromecast, and that hiring Phil Harrison last month as VP of hardware -- formerly of Microsoft and Sony's gaming divisions -- could point toward a standalone gaming console. You probably shouldn't get your hopes up yet, though.

At a mere 23 years old, Japan's latest news anchor would make her parents proud -- if she had any. Erica, a lifelike android designed to look like a 23-year-old woman, may soon become a TV news anchor in Japan, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka Universityand Erica's creator, the android will replace a human news anchor on the airwaves as soon as April, the Daily Mail said. Erica the android may be well suited for this desk job. For starters, she can capably recite scripted writing and sit in a chair, making her about as qualified for television as most humans.

In (deep) RL, lots of inductive biases are already built-in. Other inductive biases that I believe (and many RL/AI researchers have argued) should be there include "curiosity" and "representation at object / event level", although successful attempts so far are restricted to symbolic representations, AFAIK.

"Alexa, can you order me a pizza from Dominos?" "Alexa, do you know Siri?" These are just some of the questions you might enjoy asking Alexa on your smartphone now that Amazon has brought the voice control feature to the Android version of the app. But before you start geeking out, here's the rundown of the most recent update: Until recently, the Amazon Alexa app could only be used to control settings for the Echo, Dot, and other supported devices. Considering what the AI-powered assistant is actually capable of, this is nothing to get excited about. But now all that has changed as Amazon brings voice control to the Android version of the app, making Alexa a full-fledge digital assistant on Android handsets.

In my last post, I started the investigation into artificial intelligence by taking a look at how the art industry is being changed by advances in AI and machine learning technologies. Today, we're going to dig a little deeper into AI's impact on the creative arts by seeing how it relates to music. You're probably already familiar with machine learning when it comes to music, even if you don't know it. Spotify uses it to power their recommendations in the same way that Netflix uses it to suggest movies that you might like. But classifying music and making recommendations is nothing when compared to what AI itself is capable of.