Google has today awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK's Press Association to develop robot reporters that can crank out 30,000 articles a month for local newspapers and bloggers. The cash injection is part of the advertising goliath's €150m Digital News Initiative, a three-year program that allegedly supports European journalism through technology (or, rather, helps websites get more readers and thus shift more Google ads). Now in its third and final year, the fund will bankroll 107 projects in 27 countries to the tune of €22m ($25m) in 2017. The Press Association project – codenamed RADAR, or Reporters and Data and Robots – will be a collaborative effort with Urbs Media, a UK startup that specializes in automated data journalism. The Press Association is Blighty's equivalent of America's Associated Press – a roving newswire that feeds stories to publications.

This paper presents a statistical method for use in music transcription that can estimate score times of note onsets and offsets from polyphonic MIDI performance signals. Because performed note durations can deviate largely from score-indicated values, previous methods had the problem of not being able to accurately estimate offset score times (or note values) and thus could only output incomplete musical scores. Based on observations that the pitch context and onset score times are influential on the configuration of note values, we construct a context-tree model that provides prior distributions of note values using these features and combine it with a performance model in the framework of Markov random fields. Evaluation results show that our method reduces the average error rate by around 40 percent compared to existing/simple methods. We also confirmed that, in our model, the score model plays a more important role than the performance model, and it automatically captures the voice structure by unsupervised learning.

For years Dish Network Corp. DISH 1.00% Chief Executive Charlie Ergen has sought out deals and partnerships with just about every major telecom company, from Sprint Corp. S -2.31% to T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS -0.83% to AT&T Inc. --so far, to no avail. Now, the satellite-television mogul is turning his attention to the technology world and a new--and somewhat surprising--potential partner has emerged: Amazon.com The two men--eccentric billionaires with geek tendencies and shared interest in space and robotics--have gotten to know each other better over the past year and have discussed a partnership to enter the wireless business, according to people familiar with the matter. Among the ideas: Amazon could help finance a network Dish is building focused on the "Internet of Things"--the idea that everything from bikes to Amazon's drones can have web connectivity everywhere. Another idea is that Amazon, as a founding partner of Dish's new wireless network, could offer an option for Prime members to pay a little more a month for a connectivity or phone plan, one of the people said.

Artificial intelligence is all over the place these days, predicting our thoughts, protecting our crops, playing video games and even generating adorably weird pickup lines. British band Muse is getting in on the act now with a new AI-generated music video that pulls internet video footage of celebrities, politicians and artists to match the lyrics to the hit song, "Dig Down." The result feels like even more political than the original video, which explores the consequences of technology within a media-fueled cyberpunk dystopia. The video will update daily with newly scraped video that contains the words to the song; the AI tool then strings it all together and times the lyrics with the background music to create an oddly satisfying rendition of Muse's tune. Each lyric is spoken by a different person, and is highlighted with subtitles to help the whole thing hang together.

Robots will help a national news agency to create up to 30,000 local news stories a month, with the help of human journalists and funded by a Google grant. The Press Association has won a €706,000 (£621,000) grant to run a news service with computers writing localised news stories. The national news agency, which supplies copy to news outlets in the UK and Ireland, has teamed up with data-driven news start-up Urbs Media for the project, which aims to create "a stream of compelling local stories for hundreds of media outlets". It won one of the largest grants to date from Google's Digital News Initiative (DNI), which is aimed at supporting innovation in European digital journalism. PA and Urbs Media will set up Radar – Reporters And Data And Robots – to produce thousands of stories each month.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. With Amazon Prime Day coming up, there will be lots of deals Prime members can only get by ordering through an Amazon Alexa device. If you don't already have an Echo or Fire device, now is the perfect chance to get one for a great low price. The Amazon Tap, Amazon's portable bluetooth speaker, gives you a great way to listen to your music anywhere you are.

Is bingeing a good thing? The mobile network Three would like to persuade you it is. Its latest, just-announced phone tariff is called Go Binge and it encourages you to make the most of your 4G connection with streaming that doesn't impact on your monthly data total. Not for just any streaming, you understand, but for four carefully picked apps. They're pretty good apps to choose, though: Netflix, TVPlayer, Deezer and SoundCloud.

I am one of the authors of ShuffleNet. We've designed a new convolutional neural network structure for mobile platforms which utilizes pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle. Under the budget of 40MFLOPS, we've achieved 6.7% absolute top-1 error reduction on ImageNet classification compared to MobileNets. Empirically, our network with approximately the same error runs 13x faster than AlexNet on an ARM platform.

Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant that powers, among other things, its popular Echo smart speaker, has grown its third-party-created skillset from 10,000 to 15,000 in under six months, as developers race to get their software on what has become an increasingly popular platform. The figures come from Voicebot, which analysed skills available in the US, and shows a massive acceleration in the volume of third-party software available through Alexa. At the start of the year, there were around 7,000 skills available on the platform, according to Voicebot, and Amazon's official figures suggest that in September 2016, there were only around 3,500. 'Flash Briefings', which provide audio updates on news, weather and other topics, are the most popular skills, making up 20 per cent of the US skills store. With both a clear use case and a simple development process, publishers have flocked to this format, with The Wall Street Journal, NPR and The Washington Post all launching Alexa Skills that saw significant downloads.

Spotify's music recommendation engine – Spotify have built their own AI and machine learning engine, whose sole purpose is monitor a user's listening preferences and tailor the whole product around it. In the first 2-3 weeks Spotify's AI engine would have understood what you like, which artists are your favorite, what are the genre's you are most interested in, to minute details like, when do you listen most often, your average listening period, etc. Using all these data, the AI engine will recommend music that you are most likely to favorite or save to your own collection. Apart from that, it will automatically send you communication about new releases from your favorite artists, how your favorite music charts are shaping up, etc. Streaming industry experts, credit Spotify's AI engine for their massive growth in last 6 years and also how easily they have fended off bigger companies like Apple, Google, etc in the same industry to keep the top player title for themselves.