As he proposes, all writing may, in one way or another, be an expression of desire. "I always assumed that probably Marx had some kind of fetish for workmen, which is why he wanted more of them in the world," he jokes. In his own case, that means that his personal fetishes--most famously, his attraction to men with heavily bitten nails--often find their way into his stories. "That's always what I wrote about," he says, claiming that the practice goes back to childhood. "I started by writing my masturbation fantasies down in a notebook."

It's that time of year again--time to pay homage to the wackiest, most wonderful tech gadgets around. As you might know by now, I'm a huge fan of "unique" gifts. Lucky for all of us who appreciate the stranger things (and the Stranger Things) this year, the cup runneth over. If you've been jonesing for a robot since the early Jetson days, Kuri ($799) delivers big time on cute and quirky, minus the ability to wash the windows and clean up after Astro. Kuri's a robotic home companion that wanders around the house shooting short videos to send to you while you're away, so that you never miss a moment.

In this contributed article, Sharmistha Sarkar of India based Progressive Markets, highlights a handful of compelling technology advancements that are helping to drive the evolution of artificial intelligence. Industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 46.5% from 2017 to 2025. The market is growing fast due to improved productivity through AI, its diversified application areas, and big data integration drive....

Marketing Mix Modeling refers to statistical methods that attribute product performance to various marketing efforts. In the article below I describe the 10 most difficult challenges my team deals with when tackling these models. In subsequent articles I will discuss the different model choices along with their associated pros/cons. Enjoy the article and please comment at the bottom when you are finished. Below are the top 10 challenges faced by modelers of media mix.

There's a well-devised, satanic conspiracy to replace humans with robots. This conspiracy-fact is being played out between government, a specific group of billionaires and the mad scientist assembling this replacement project. The Universal Basic Income aspect of this conspiracy is the monetary pacifier, the mass domestication, the frog in the pot of gradually boiling water, if you will, to prevent a premature, informed revolt before the actual replacement process. You may think a mechanical robot like the one in the movie Chappie is cute and it may make you feel all warm and fuzzy. You may have even acquired a protective instinct for robots, while watching the movie, which I'm sure, is the intended purpose.

An Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Wrote a NEW Harry Potter story that your Friend Forever Evan Lefavor reads to you in this video.

AWS DeepLens Looking for a new way to learn machine learning? Let a machine teach you with AWS DeepLens, the world's first deep learning enabled video camera for developers. Designed to connect securely to a variety of AWS offerings, including AWS IoT, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon DynamoDB, AWS DeepLens uses Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to stream video back to AWS and Amazon Rekognition Video to apply advanced video analytics. Easy to customize and fully programmable with AWS Lambda, AWS DeepLens runs on any deep learning framework, including TensorFlow and Caffe.

Abstract--This work presents a new robust PCA method for foreground-background separation on freely moving camera video with possible dense and sparse corruptions. Our proposed method registers the frames of the corrupted video and then encodes the varying perspective arising from camera motion as missing data in a global model. This formulation allows our algorithm to produce a panoramic background component that automatically stitches together corrupted data from partially overlapping frames to reconstruct the full field of view. We model the registered video as the sum of a low-rank component that captures the background, a smooth component that captures the dynamic foreground of the scene, and a sparse component that isolates possible outliers and other sparse corruptions in the video. The low-rank portion of our model is based on a recent low-rank matrix estimator (OptShrink) that has been shown to yield superior low-rank subspace estimates in practice. To estimate the smooth foreground component of our model, we use a weighted total variation framework that enables our method to reliably decouple the true foreground of the video from sparse corruptions. We perform extensive numerical experiments on both static and moving camera video subject to a variety of dense and sparse corruptions. Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method compared to existing methods both in terms of foreground and background estimation accuracy.

Most of the literature in ML that I've come across has been heavily based in either Computer Vision, Robotics1 or NLP. Are there any other lesser known, but really exciting applications of Machine Learning in Electrical Engineering, currently being researched? Some examples would be designing chips, circuits or control algorithms (not robotics based).

The company unveiled some of those latest capabilities yesterday during an event in San Francisco. They include a preview version of Insights, a new service that automatically identifies trends and patterns in Excel spreadsheets, along with new intelligent search features for Bing. Yesterday, Microsoft also announced a partnership with the news aggregation and social media site Reddit that will provide Bing searches with relevant results from Reddit conversations and communities. Those results will include content from Reddit's AMA, for "Ask Me Anything," conversations with well-known figures from a wide variety of industries and walks of life. All the AI-powered enhancements Microsoft has been rolling out recently are aimed at providing users with "richer, more useful information," the company said.