If you enjoy Google Play Music's recommendations based on what you listen to, you can thank researcher Douglas Eck. The former University of Montreal computer science professor used machine learning principles on that project, and is now experimenting with it to see if he can teach computers to make art and music on their own. Eck, along with a handful of Google Brain team members, is gearing up to launch Magenta on June 1. The project will involve the use of Google's open-source AI platform TensorFlow to create algorithms that can generate music. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May.

This video will get you up and running with your first movie recommender system in just 10 lines of C . We train a neural network on a MovieLens dataset of movie ratings by different users to generate a top 10 recommendation list for the default user ID. Thanks for watching my videos, I do it for you. I left my awesome job at Twilio and I'm doing this full time now. Much more to come so please subscribe, like, and comment.

Magenta will use TensorFlow, the machine-learning engine that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of 2015, to determine whether AI systems can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. Much in the same way that Google opened up TensorFlow, Eck said Magenta will make available its tools to the public. Roberts also showed off a simple digital synthesizer program he'd been working on, where an AI could listen to notes that he played, and play back a more complete melody from those notes: The goal of the project, Eck suggested, could well be to create a system that could give a listener "musical chills" with entirely new pieces of music, on a regular basis, as they sit listening to computer-generated music from the comfort of their couch at home. Eck said the inspiration for Magenta had come from other Google Brain projects, like Google DeepDream, where AI systems were trained on image databases to "fill in the gaps" in pictures, trying to find structures in images that weren't necessarily present in the images themselves.

Magenta will use TensorFlow, the machine-learning engine that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of 2015, to determine whether AI systems can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. Much in the same way that Google opened up TensorFlow, Eck said Magenta will make available its tools to the public. Roberts also showed off a simple digital synthesizer program he'd been working on, where an AI could listen to notes that he played, and play back a more complete melody from those notes: The goal of the project, Eck suggested, could well be to create a system that could give a listener "musical chills" with entirely new pieces of music, on a regular basis, as they sit listening to computer-generated music from the comfort of their couch at home. Eck said the inspiration for Magenta had come from other Google Brain projects, like Google DeepDream, where AI systems were trained on image databases to "fill in the gaps" in pictures, trying to find structures in images that weren't necessarily present in the images themselves.

Google wants to put the art back in artificial intelligence. During the last session at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival, in Durham, North Carolina, Douglas Eck, a researcher on Google Brain, the company's artificial-intelligence research project, outlined a new group that's going to focus on figuring out if computers can truly create. The group, called Magenta, will launch more publicly at the start of June, but attendees at Moogfest were given a taste of what it's going to be working on. Magenta will use TensorFlow, the machine-learning engine that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of 2015, to determine whether AI systems can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. This is no simple task, given that even the most advanced artificially intelligent systems have enough trouble copying the styles of existing artists and musicians, let alone coming up with entirely new ideas themselves.

Douglas Eck, a researcher at Google, talks about Magenta during at panel at Moogfest. If Google's artificial intelligence can paint its dreams, why not make other kinds of art? On June 1, Google is set to launch Magenta, a research project to explore using artificial intelligence to create art, and make that process easier for TensorFlow users. The group has about six researchers now, and will invite other academics to help try to solve the problem of creative machines. The project exists within Google Brain group.

He bobbed his head with the groove, and leaned way in when he wanted to play more complicated melodies, rocking and rolling with the beat of the jam. This wasn't a your average jazz band member, though--this was Shimon, a four-armed robot marimba player built by the Georgia Institute of Technology to be able to listen to music, improvise, and play along with human musicians. At a performance at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Gil Weinberg, the lead researcher at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology, demonstrated what he and his lab have been working on for the past 12 years. Their efforts have aimed at augmenting the creative capabilities of humans with robotics. That can mean robots like Shimon, which uses machine-learning programs trained on music theory and a wide range of musical styles, from chamber music to dubstep, to be able to add a superhuman element to musical performances, playing chord structures that would be physically impossible for humans to hit. But it can also mean robotic enhancements for humans: At the concert, Weinberg introduced Jason Barnes, a drummer who lost the lower part of his right arm a few years ago.

"I don't know what you mean - how about a web search for it?" If you want the latest football scores, to add meetings to your calendar or launch an app, today's virtual assistants are relatively good at understanding your voice and doing what's asked. But try to have the type of natural conversation seen in sci-fi movies featuring artificial intelligence systems - from HAL in 2001 to the sultry-voiced operating system Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her - and you'll find your device about as smart as a waterproof teabag. "Google and Apple are painfully aware that their systems are not getting better fast enough because right now Siri and Google Now and the other personal assistant type applications are all programmed by hand," says Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge. "If you speak to Siri about baseball it seems relatively intelligent, but if you ask it something much less common it doesn't really do anything except for a web search. "That's an indication that the programmers have been busy trying to anticipate what people want to ask about baseball but haven't thought about people who ask about, for example, GPU chips because you don't get many queries about that." Microsoft doesn't yet have a virtual assistant on its Windows Phone platform, but the company is experimenting with AI in lifts and reception desks at its headquarters. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's research unit, believes part of the solution involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. "The ability of a system to understand more broadly what the overall context of a communication is turns out to be very important," he told the BBC. "There are some critical signals in context.

Marvel's release of Captain America: Civil War is the most recent superhero movie to blow up the box office. Rotten tomatoes gave it a 90 percent rating, and it had the fifth highest domestic opening in history at 181.8 million. That got me thinking about how much we not only love but also need superheroes in our lives. They use their superhuman powers to protect the innocent or vulnerable people of our society, and we love that ideal. We can't get enough of it.

The movie's opening may as well arrive with an on-screen statement. Loud shrieking lends the impression a couple is having sex, but the first sight is a close-up of a cat. Then the camera cuts to the source of the shrieks, and it turns out what sounded like love was actually an assault. Needling, absurd, sexual, kinetic -- all those adjectives apply to Verhoeven. The Dutch-born director has followed one of the more improbable career arcs in modern cinema -- from European obscurity to Hollywood heights to industry punch-line ("Showgirls," anyone?), back to European acclaim.