When he was 8 years old, Matt Reeves started making 8-millimeter movies inspired by his love for the original "Planet of the Apes." "I'd have my friends put on gorilla masks and run around shooting these little sci-fi films," he recalls. "As a kid, I was captivated by these images of horses with apes on them." Decades later, Reeves, perched on a sofa in his tidy Hollywood office, has taken his fascination with primate cinema to a whole new level as the auteur behind the 2014 performance-capture blockbuster "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" and this summer's "War for the Planet of the Apes." Taking the reins from "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" director Rupert Wyatt, Reeves, lauded for his low-budget horror hit "Cloverfield," initially harbored reservations about helming Twentieth Century Fox's multimillion-dollar franchise.

"Mortal Kombat: Annihilation," the sequel film to 1995's "Mortal Kombat," came out on this day 20 years ago. The movie, which was based on the popular fighting video game, was released on Nov. 21, 1997. Despite currently having a three percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film opened in theaters to $16 million, making it No. 1 at the box office that weekend. It ended up taking in a little over $50 million worldwide. Despite not having the best reception at the box office, for years there were plans to make a third film in the franchise.

This year, STOA's Annual Lecture will focus upon how media and other information is managed and distributed in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes how AI can be used to disseminate quality information as well as misinformation, as well as how algorithms can be used to counteract fake news. At their most simple, they are sets of rules and instructions, usually expressed in computer code, followed in order to solve a problem. For example, applying rules to historical data about people to decide which information to send to them. Algorithms have been around for a long time – longer than AI, and even longer than computers.

Do you believe that artificial intelligence is poised to significantly improve our societies, or do you imagine extreme dangers resulting from this technology in the future? Tech moguls Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been publicly debating this issue recently, with Musk claiming that Zuckerberg's knowledge about AI is "limited". The Tesla CEO and outspoken innovator has been pushing for the proactive regulation of artificial intelligence based on his belief that the technology is a "fundamental existential risk for human civilization." On the other side, Zuckerberg has denounced Musk's warnings, calling his statements "pretty irresponsible." While many academics, such as Pedro Domingos, a professor who works on machine learning at the University of Michigan, believe that Musk's nightmare scenarios could eventually happen, but his perspective is entirely wrong.

We propose a novel approach for the generation of polyphonic music based on LSTMs. We generate music in two steps. First, a chord LSTM predicts a chord progression based on a chord embedding. A second LSTM then generates polyphonic music from the predicted chord progression. The generated music sounds pleasing and harmonic, with only few dissonant notes. It has clear long-term structure that is similar to what a musician would play during a jam session. We show that our approach is sensible from a music theory perspective by evaluating the learned chord embeddings. Surprisingly, our simple model managed to extract the circle of fifths, an important tool in music theory, from the dataset.

We propose an automatic method to infer high dynamic range illumination from a single, limited field-of-view, low dynamic range photograph of an indoor scene. In contrast to previous work that relies on specialized image capture, user input, and/or simple scene models, we train an end-to-end deep neural network that directly regresses a limited field-of-view photo to HDR illumination, without strong assumptions on scene geometry, material properties, or lighting. We show that this can be accomplished in a three step process: 1) we train a robust lighting classifier to automatically annotate the location of light sources in a large dataset of LDR environment maps, 2) we use these annotations to train a deep neural network that predicts the location of lights in a scene from a single limited field-of-view photo, and 3) we fine-tune this network using a small dataset of HDR environment maps to predict light intensities. This allows us to automatically recover high-quality HDR illumination estimates that significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Consequently, using our illumination estimates for applications like 3D object insertion, we can achieve results that are photo-realistic, which is validated via a perceptual user study.

The most recent episode of Rotten Tomatoes' new movie-review series, See It/Skip It, opened not with a rave, nor a thumbs-down, but a semi-apology. "We've seen the conversations online about the Justice League Tomatometer," co-host Jacqueline Coley told her Facebook Watch audience, "and we get it: You guys are passionate about this film. But we hope everyone understands the only thing we're trying to do is add context and conversation around the Tomatometer, and not just give a number." What's Zack Snyder Been Doing Since He Left Justice League? It was an odd, stilted start to what's supposed to be a breezy movie-chat show (the phrase "context and conversation around the Tomatometer" sounds like something a drunken Babelfish bot might spit out).

Vinci 2.0 is a standalone computing device with a Quad-Core ARM Cortex A-7 processor and WiFi, 3G cellular（SIM card built-in), and Bluetooth connectivity. You can ask Vinci to make a call, send a text message, set a reminder, or give you directions. No phone is required so you can carry less and workout more. Vinci 2.0 can receive push notifications directly from your phone no matter how far away you are from it. Whether you are lifting weights, jogging, or cycling, just ask Vinci for your favorite songs, request songs by specific genres or moods, or let Vinci recommend a song for you, 20 languages supported.

The holidays are upon us, which means toys are popping up everywhere. There are Hatchimals and Shopkins, Fingerlings and Oonies, and of course updates on classics like Legos and Nintendo. The most popular of the bunch have already begun selling out online and in stores. Shoppers are projected to spend an average of $967.13 this holiday season, a 3.4 percent increase from last year, with the bulk of that money going toward gifts for family members, according to the National Retail Federation. Spending on toys is also on the rise, with roughly 40 percent of adults saying they plan to buy toys this year, up from 29 percent five years ago, according to data from Deloitte.

Eighty-five per cent of senior executives plan to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) by 2020, according to a new survey of UK digital leaders by Deloitte. The findings come from the first edition of a new regular report from Deloitte, the Digital Disruption Index. The index will track investment in digital technologies and create a detailed picture of their impact on the largest and most influential business and public sector bodies. The first edition includes responses from 51 organisations with a combined market value of £229bn. Over half of survey respondents expect that by 2020, they will invest more than £10 million in digital technologies and ways of working – such as AI, cloud, robotics, blockchain, analytics, the IoT, and virtual and augmented reality. Seventy-three per cent say they will invest in robotics, 63 per cent in augmented and virtual reality, 62 per cent in wearables, 54 per cent in biometrics (such as voice and finger recognition), and 43 per cent in blockchain.*