Sony Corp. shares rose as investors ignored a weak profit forecast, looking instead to the company's long-term prospects in entertainment and sensors needed for driverless cars and other emerging products. In New York, shares rose even after the company issued an annual profit outlook that fell short of analysts' estimates due to costs for repairs after the Kyushu earthquakes. The impact of the quakes and a slowdown in demand for image sensors that power cameras in smartphones -- including Apple Inc.'s iPhone -- are testing Sony's ability to generate more of its earnings from PlayStation gaming consoles, streaming services for its 65 million online users as well as movies and music. Still, profit at Sony's games and network services business will rise 52 percent to 135 billion ( 1.2 billion) on anticipated sales of PS4 consoles this year. "All the bad news is probably out for the time being, and we expect the focus to shift to the pace of recovery" in image sensor operations, Takeo Miyamoto, a Tokyo-based analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, wrote in a report on Tuesday after the earnings.

Two Maine brothers will be contributing to a human-piloted robot that's competing in a one-on-one battle with another robot from Japan. Twins Geoffrey and Michael Howe tell The Portland Press Herald their Waterboro company, Howe & Howe Technologies, will add to an enhanced version of a prototype called the Mk. The prototype was built by a California startup called MegaBots Inc. The company announced in the summer of 2015 that it had challenged a Japanese robotics firm to a battle and that it had accepted the challenge. Howe & Howe is responsible for building a track base, which resembles a small tank.

Google Brain, the search giant's machine learning arm, is setting up a new group to see if it can teach AI to make its own, original works of art. The company, named Magenta, will be announced more officially at the beginning of June, but was referenced to in a talk given by Douglas Eck, a Google Brain researcher, at Moogfest. This new group has been founded specifically to find out if computers can actually create their own works of art. Whether that be more traditional pictures, videos or even music, Magenta wants to find out if it's possible. The aim may sound familiar to other Google Brain projects, but its direction is completely different.

Stock photo giant Shutterstock is boosting its artificial intelligence (AI) credentials today with the launch of a new reverse image search feature within its iOS app. The New York-based company offers more than 80 million images for bloggers and media outlets, but keyword searches aren't always the most effective way to find images relevant to a story. If you want to search for photos that are similar to ones you already have in your possession, or if you want to find alternative photos based on the shapes, mood, color scheme, and general mise en scène around you, reverse image search comes into play. You can search Shutterstock by using the camera on your iPhone or the photos on your camera roll to find similar images. The launch comes three months after Shutterstock first introduced the feature through its desktop version, though extending it to smartphones does feel like a natural move, given that smartphones are cameras in their own right.

Over the weekend, a senior researcher at Google spoke about how he and his team are trying to build a computer that can be creative. Douglas Eck, part of Google Brain, a deep-learning research project explained at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in the US that he and his team are using TensorFlow, an open-source library for machine intelligence to investigate whether AI systems can be taught to create original pieces of music, art or even video. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! The inspiration behind the project, Eck explained, was to create a computer system that could create entirely new pieces of music on a regular basis. While an impressive engineering feat, it completely misses the point of what creativity is, and its importance in helping us interpret, challenge and add meaning to our existence.

Machines, not humans, are the world's dominant knowledge accumulators but humans remain the dominant decision makers. Interpreting and disseminating the knowledge accumulated by machines requires expertise, time, and is prone to failure. The problem of how best to convey accumulated knowledge from computers to humans is a critical bottleneck in the broader application of machine learning. We propose an approach based on human teaching where the problem is formalized as selecting a small subset of the data that will, with high probability, lead the human user to the correct inference. This approach, though successful for modeling human learning in simple laboratory experiments, has failed to achieve broader relevance due to challenges in formulating general and scalable algorithms. We propose general-purpose teaching via pseudo-marginal sampling and demonstrate the algorithm by teaching topic models. Simulation results show our sampling-based approach: effectively approximates the probability where ground-truth is possible via enumeration, results in data that are markedly different from those expected by random sampling, and speeds learning especially for small amounts of data. Application to movie synopsis data illustrates differences between teaching and random sampling for teaching distributions and specific topics, and demonstrates gains in scalability and applicability to real-world problems.

Created as part of the company's most recent hack day (and thus, unlikely to ever see a real release), Netflix Zone is a blocky representation of your old school VHS emporium, except you peruse the stacks with an HTC Vive instead of driving to a Blockbuster in a nearby strip mall. Unfortunately there's no esoteric "Staff Picks" section, but the organization in the virtual store does reflect the user's Netflix recommendations and the whole place turns into a screening room when a user picks up a title for closer inspection. To play a title, you apparently pick it up off the shelf and just chuck it at a wall. While the idea of re-living the video store experience is enticing, some of the other hack day projects are a little more practical. Take for instance a drag-and-drop homepage interface that allows you to pin categories to the top, a "Family Catch-Up" feature that reveals how far along in a series the other profiles in your account have watched, and a "QuietCast" feature that turns your phone into a wireless headphone adapter while streaming the video to your Chromecast.

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

"In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." This is the opening line of a short film entered in this year's Sci-Fi London Film Challenge. It's dark, enigmatic, contemporary…and written by a computer. In fact, the film's entire screenplay is the work of a neural net trained on sci-fi scripts. Once the software completed the screenplay--which you can read in all its unadulterated glory here--it was up to the film's director and actors to make it into something someone might actually watch.

I recently wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence in the auditing industry and shared my predictions on which industries I expect to adopt AI next. The short answer was: all of them. I also suggested that adoption might be happening sooner that anyone previously thought, thanks to an announcement from Facebook last month. If you followed news from Facebook's F8 developer conference, which took place in April, you might be asking, "What's a chat bot?" It's essentially a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a user, and Facebook generated some buzz around the launch of its bots for Messenger platform, which has already signed on companies like CNN, Salesforce and Staples. But, at its core, a chat bot is also a form of artificial intelligence, and the mainstream adoption of them will in turn drive the mainstream adoption of AI.