In an age of Photoshop, filters and social media, many of us are used to seeing manipulated pictures – subjects become slimmer and smoother or, in the case of Snapchat, transformed into puppies. However, there's a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that will allow for the creation of realistic looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything. Hillary Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along … that he's a Brony. This is the future of fake news.

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. What does it feel like to stand here? It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything.

Many of the recent approaches to polyphonic piano note onset transcription require training a machine learning model on a large piano database. However, such approaches are limited by dataset availability; additional training data is difficult to produce, and proposed systems often perform poorly on novel recording conditions. We propose a method to quickly synthesize arbitrary quantities of training data, avoiding the need for curating large datasets. Various aspects of piano note dynamics - including nonlinearity of note signatures with velocity, different articulations, temporal clustering of onsets, and nonlinear note partial interference - are modeled to match the characteristics of real pianos. Our method also avoids the disentanglement problem, a recently noted issue affecting machine-learning based approaches. We train a feed-forward neural network with two hidden layers on our generated training data and achieve both good transcription performance on the large MAPS piano dataset and excellent generalization qualities.

One of the major hurdles preventing the full exploitation of information from online communities is the widespread concern regarding the quality and credibility of user-contributed content. Prior works in this domain operate on a static snapshot of the community, making strong assumptions about the structure of the data (e.g., relational tables), or consider only shallow features for text classification. To address the above limitations, we propose probabilistic graphical models that can leverage the joint interplay between multiple factors in online communities --- like user interactions, community dynamics, and textual content --- to automatically assess the credibility of user-contributed online content, and the expertise of users and their evolution with user-interpretable explanation. To this end, we devise new models based on Conditional Random Fields for different settings like incorporating partial expert knowledge for semi-supervised learning, and handling discrete labels as well as numeric ratings for fine-grained analysis. This enables applications such as extracting reliable side-effects of drugs from user-contributed posts in healthforums, and identifying credible content in news communities. Online communities are dynamic, as users join and leave, adapt to evolving trends, and mature over time. To capture this dynamics, we propose generative models based on Hidden Markov Model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and Brownian Motion to trace the continuous evolution of user expertise and their language model over time. This allows us to identify expert users and credible content jointly over time, improving state-of-the-art recommender systems by explicitly considering the maturity of users. This also enables applications such as identifying helpful product reviews, and detecting fake and anomalous reviews with limited information.

A new research paper by Google researchers Hui Fang and Meng Zhang has outlined their attempt to teach Google's AI how to take aesthetically pleasing photos. Creatism: A deep-learning photographer capable of creating professional work are the researchers attempt to apply machine learning to the creative process. The first step was to define different aesthetic aspects of photography like composition, saturation and detail. They then analyzed 15,000 high-ranking photo thumbnails from 500px.com so the neural network could begin to understand which cropping and lighting effects were the most popular. The next step was to unleash the machine on Google Street View and let it take snapshots of scenic locations and crop and light the results accordingly.

Justin Chang reviews "War for the Planet of the Apes," directed by Matt Reeves and starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn and Judy Greer. Justin Chang reviews "War for the Planet of the Apes," directed by Matt Reeves and starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn and Judy Greer. Justin Chang reviews "War for the Planet of the Apes," directed by Matt Reeves and starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn and Judy Greer. Justin Chang reviews "War for the Planet of the Apes," directed by Matt Reeves and starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn and Judy Greer.

At an after-party for the red carpet premiere of the seventh season of "Game of Thrones" at Walt Disney Concert Hall, partygoers watched as Westeros came to life on the building before them. An icy visage of the Night King loomed over the affair while dragons soared across the hall's sweeping arched facade, breathing flames that appeared to envelope the iconic structure. Santa Monica-based designer Bart Kresa created the multimedia installation for the HBO event using a technique called projection mapping. Employing high-powered video projectors and sophisticated spatial mapping software, projection mapping enables artists and designers to cast virtual graphics onto the physical world, fitting them to the exact contours and dimensions of just about any surface. Projected light shows have been popular in Europe for years, thanks to generous public funding for the arts.

The TiVo peanut-style remote has only changed slightly over the years, but ZatzNotFunny points out that a new revision is close to release. Labeled S6V, this Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connected remote popped up in FCC filings, while a clearer image appeared in an earlier leak along with a trademark for TiVo Bolt Vox and TiVo Mini Vox. TiVo will hardly be the first company to put a microphone inside its remote, as the Apple TV control is built around Siri and even Comcast has a version already available. The manual included in the filing describes a two-button pairing process with the TiVo and back buttons, for the company's first Bluetooth unit since the TiVo Slide keyboard-equipped remote. Besides the big blue microphone button, the picture also reveals a dedicated commercial skip button (currently the feature is relegated to the nondescript D button, the earlier leak had this button labeled for video on-demand) that highlights the TiVo's capabilities in that area.

This summer, Dartmouth College's Neukom Institute for Computational Science held its annual Turing Tests in the Creative Arts. A system developed by Thomson Reuters Research Scientist Charese Smiley and Senior Software Engineer Hiroko Bretz took first prize in the poetry contest by creating a sonnet that judges thought most likely to be written by a human. Below is the sonnet created by Charese Smiley and Hiroko Bretz's software system: And be very careful crossing the streets. Our Cognitive Computing Center of Excellence focuses on exploring the rapidly developing field of cognitive computing and machine intelligence.

Smart people are starting to worry about the brainpower of machines. A recent report from Harvard said the emergence of artificial intelligence as a weapon poses as much game-changing potential as the airplane and the nuclear bomb. They worry it could give small countries and terrorists the long-range strike capability of a superpower, the ability to crash our cyber systems and create a channel for fake news that would overwhelm our understanding of what's real and what's not. Elon Musk, the Tesla/Hyperloop/SpaceX dude prone to the grandiose, thinks unchecked artificial intelligence could become an existential threat to mankind. If we're not careful, he warns, we'll end up in a world where humans answer to machines and not the other way around.