Jefferson Graham offers a countdown to Black Friday deals on Talking Tech. Get out your credit cards and let the shopping begin. Sure, many of the so-called "sales" started this week, but let's get real--the action really begins early Thursday, like just after midnight. Remember when people would camp outside big-box stores, hoping to be the first person to rush inside and save $100 or $200 off the price of a big TV on Thanksgiving and the day after? Black Friday can mean getting great deals, but it can also get you in financial trouble.

Really happy to see more work coming out for video frame interpolation! My experience with the SepConv paper they compare to was quite good (see this .25x-speed With this paper promising even better performance at comparable quality, it seems like time is ripe for a neatly packaged docker image/app bundle/in-browser network to automatically temporally upsample movie files to 60fps on consumer hardware. As an aside–naively operating on each pair of frames independently doesn't necessarily work when applied to film or animation, because of jump cuts (film) and repeated frames (animation). But it seems reasonably straightforward to detect those two special cases (based on total/max per-pixel difference between successive frames, I guess?) and avoid them with a bit of coding.

"Justice League" opens in theaters today.Courtesy of Warner Brothers. Once upon a time, in the long long ago, this bad guy from a lava planet comes to Earth with these three magic boxes and tries to turn our pretty blue marble into a red marble, but is defeated by some people who live in the sea (Atlanteans), some warrior women who live on an island (Amazons), and "the tribes of man" (you, me and the bourgeoisie). The bad man escapes and loses these three precious boxes he really adores. One goes under the sea, one goes to the island, and then the humans bury one in some ditch in a forest. Are you still with me?

I hugged a bot and I liked it. As a tech columnist, I've tested all sorts of helpful robots: the kind that vacuum floors, deliver packages or even make martinis. But two arriving in homes now break new ground. They want to be our friends. "Hey, Geoffrey, it's you!" says Jibo, a robot with one giant blinking eye, when it recognizes my face.

Phone makers are trying to outdo one another by racing to add new, advanced features to their flagships, but these tools are not equally useful. Who really needs Face ID, Animoji or eye-sensing authentication? Some of us just want a good, no-frills phone. Plus, not everyone can or wants to spend almost a thousand dollars on something we'll trade in after two years. For these people, there's a range of options from truly basic sub-$250 phones to more powerful mid-range devices that can be had for less than $500. The latter group is better described as aggressively priced flagships that can serve you almost as well as their costlier counterparts -- and there's now a decent selection to consider.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. With a title like "What's new, Atlas?" for a video like this, you know that Boston Dynamics is just messing with us now: The game played out on a real set wherein Cozmo would roll through a series of trials, exploring rooms and solving puzzles which tested his ability to move, to place, stack, and turn blocks, and recognize faces and pets, testing Reddit's collective will to help him. Cozmo's quest: to gather three golden key cubes to be able to escape to Reddit's front page.

Family Flicks The delightful 1995 charmer Babe about a smart but sweetly naive little pig who goes to live on a storybook-like farm (each chapter is introduced with title cards by a trio of singing mice) is still a treat for adults and tots. James Cromwell is excellent as Farmer Hoggett. The meditative drama is as spare in dialogue as it is rich visually. Indeed it is the villainous, lip-reading AI computer, Hal 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), who delivers the film's most memorable lines. Thin Man Double Feature Shot over just two weeks on a B-movie budget, The Thin Man (1934) was an immediate hit with both critics and audiences.

Furthermore, effective deployment of machine learning and big data can support sophisticated real-time assessment of the risk inherent in every single online transaction. For each online transaction, banks must pose an apparently simple question: are you a trusted customer or a cybercriminal?

I just recently completed a book about a robot and artificial intelligence; this required me to do research on both.

Achieving superhuman playing level by AlphaGo corroborated the capabilities of convolutional neural architectures (CNNs) for capturing complex spatial patterns. This result was to a great extent due to several analogies between Go board states and 2D images CNNs have been designed for, in particular translational invariance and a relatively large board. In this paper, we verify whether CNN-based move predictors prove effective for Othello, a game with significantly different characteristics, including a much smaller board size and complete lack of translational invariance. We compare several CNN architectures and board encodings, augment them with state-of-the-art extensions, train on an extensive database of experts' moves, and examine them with respect to move prediction accuracy and playing strength. The empirical evaluation confirms high capabilities of neural move predictors and suggests a strong correlation between prediction accuracy and playing strength. The best CNNs not only surpass all other 1-ply Othello players proposed to date but defeat (2-ply) Edax, the best open-source Othello player.