We're happy to announce Magenta, a project from the Google Brain team that asks: Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music? Soon we'll begin accepting code contributions from the community at large. If you'd like to keep up on Magenta as it grows, you can follow us on our GitHub and join our discussion group. First, it's a research project to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation. Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation.

Amazon's assistant Alexa will make its way to the Pebble Core. Just last week the Kickstarter smartwatch company Pebble announced a revamp to its entire product line. The Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2 welcomed the Pebble Core: a portable Spotify player with smartphone internals and no screen. The device was meant for music-lovers, of course, but also for tinkerers: Because it runs Android, developing apps for the Core could extend its functionality to allow for some interesting uses. Now, Pebble itself is adding in a feature that makes the Core even more useful: Amazon's Alexa voice assistant will come to the portable media player.

Tribune Publishing, the parent company that owns several storied and proud newspapers in the US including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, announced on Thursday that it would be changing its name to "tronc Inc." In a press release, the company said that tronc Inc would be "a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels". The name, according to the release, is a shortening of Tribune Online Content. "tronc pools the company's leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60m monthly users," the release continued, using the lower-case t despite the word coming at the beginning of the sentence. The release also announced the launch of "troncX", an "online curation and monetization engine" which utilizes artificial intelligence technology "to accelerate digital growth".

After Thursday's annual shareholder meeting in downtown Los Angeles, LA Times' parent Tribune Publishing announced it would be changing its name to tronc Inc. and moving its shares from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq, effective June 20. In the release, the future consonant-heavy media organization describes itself as a "a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels," or a news organization, in other words. It also "plans to launch www.tronc.com, "Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating," Ferro said in the release. Earlier in the day, Tribune Chairman Michael Ferro won a big victory when he had his slate of board members confirmed.

The overall goal is to target treatment specifically to each individual so that clinical outcomes for that individual are optimized. One direction of attack is to use patient data to discover decision rules which specify the treatment to use as a function of a vector of features from the patient. Regression and classification are important statistical tools for estimating such rules based on either observational data or data from a randomized trial, and machine learning can help with this because of its ability to artfully handle high dimensional feature spaces with potentially complex interactions.

As I write this, I'm listening to music written and performed by a robot that was built by Brain.fm to help me focus. I think it might be working, giving me a tiny buzz. It could of course be a placebo effect. In fact, the fact that I even wrote that last three-word sentence should tell you something about the attitude in which I approached Brain.fm's Brain.fm is a new audio startup out of Chicago that produces music written by artificial intelligence that promises to get your brain into one of several desired states, from deep sleep to focused work.

Tribune Publishing Co. said late Thursday it will change its name to Tronc (which the company spells with lowercase T) and focus on turning itself into a "content curation and monetization" company that creates and distributes "premium" content. "Our transformation strategy ... is focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the user experience and better monetize our world-class content," Chairman Michael Ferro said in a statement. "Our rebranding to tronc represents the manner in which we will pool our technology and content resources to execute on our strategy." The new company will transfer its stock-exchange listing to Nasdaq from the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the newly renamed Tronc were flat in late trading after ending the regular trading session down 1.8%.

It looks like USA Today is officially not going to be the Los Angeles Times' tomorrow. During its annual shareholder meeting here Thursday morning, Tribune Publishing, the Times' parent company, won a key victory. Its tech-entrepreneur owner fended off two takeover attempts from Gannett, publisher of USA Today, and won approval of his board slate. Before the meeting, Bloomberg reported, Gannett was likely to pull out of acquisition talks pending the result of the vote, an outcome that seems almost perfunctory at this point. Now all Tribune chairman Michael Ferro has to do is make the futuristic vision he and the company's new vice chairman and second-largest investor, biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, have for the company -- which includes artificial intelligence, "machine vision" technology and new bureaus from Rio de Janeiro to Lagos -- a promising story about the future of news.

Shekar Natarajan, Wal-Mart's vice president of logistics strategy, told reporters the technology is custom-built on top of the drone and is proprietary for Wal-Mart. A control tower will oversee the images on a screen and will send alerts when items are flagged so that workers can go back to the stacks to fix the issue.

With its new music-and-art project, called Magenta, Google is putting the "art" in artificial intelligence. The minds inside the Google Brain team have released a 90-second piano melody that was generated through machine learning. The project, first announced at Moogfest, is built on top of Google's TensorFlow, the web giant's open-source AI engine. Magenta's algorithm was primed with only four notes to start with, and it took off from there to plunk out a verse and bridge of sorts. The drum parts were added later for texture.