She writes about software development, UI and UX, natural language processing, Big Data, AI, and other IT-related topics.

For a sci-fi fan like me, fascinated by the nature of human intelligence and the possibility of building life-like robots, it's always interesting to find a new angle on these questions. As a re-imagining of the original 1970s science fiction film set in a cowboy-themed, hyper-real adult theme park populated by robots that look and act like people, Westworld does not disappoint. Westworld challenges us to consider the difference between being human and being a robot. From the beginning of this new serialisation on HBO we are confronted with scenes of graphic human-on-robot violence. But the robots in Westworld have more than just human-like physical bodies, they display emotion including extreme pain, they see and recognise each other's suffering, they bleed and even die.

How do you know when a gadget has become part of the American cultural zeitgeist? When it gets its own Saturday Night Live routine, apparently. The comedy show ran a skit (US-only) on May 13th pitching the "Amazon Echo Silver," an imaginary smart speaker aimed at the "greatest generation." Not surprisingly, that means lots of stereotypical jokes about seniors: the Silver is extremely loud, repeats itself and will answer back if you say any name that sounds even vaguely like Alexa. Naturally, you can only order it with a check or money order.

Artificial intelligence is all around us, whether it's to recommend movies you might like or weed out unsavory videos. Smaller companies such as Conversica are joining the likes of Google and Facebook in pursuing AI. Conversica sells digital assistants to businesses ranging from car dealerships to real estate companies. They work just as an entry-level sales or marketing person would; customers usually don't know they're interacting with software, or a bot, when responding to a sales pitch or seeking help. Conversica CEO Alex Terry spoke recently with The Associated Press about the future of AI and its impact on jobs.

Amazon Echo Silver responds to dozens of names that sound like "Alexa," tolerates rambling anecdotes without argument, and is programmed to carefully sidestep casual racism. Saturday Night Live had some fun with Amazon's cylindrical talking speaker, turning the Siri-like voice interface into an eternally patient caretaker for "the greatest generation." The punchline here -- "LOL aren't old people lame and adorably hateful?" -- is questionable, but SNL's talented cast capably milks it for some memorable zingers, at least. Melissa McCarthy's funniest'SNL' moment had nothing to do with politics Stephen Colbert explains why Comey's firing was kinda like'The Godfather' Katy Perry's cannibalism video for'Bon Appétit' is finally here

In IBB Consulting's work with media companies, we've identified three key areas where opportunity exists to integrate AI and machine learning to improve the customer experience, boost revenues, increase productivity and more. From chatbots and content creation to new levels of personalization, the following areas are opportunities to integrate AI into everything from consumer-facing properties to internal functions. AI-driven chatbots can already interact with people on the web or on mobile to help find information, answer questions and sell services. We're early in the game when it comes to how they will be deployed, with the goal being to ultimately get to a place where communicating with a chatbot feels no different than chatting with a real person. Most customer requests and issues are basic and can be handled by programming chatbots to understand questions and trigger words, then provide answers by querying specific data sources.

Sometime in the coming decades, an external system that collects and analyzes endless streams of biometric data will probably be able to understand what's going on in my body and in my brain much better than me. Such a system will transform politics and economics by allowing governments and corporations to predict and manipulate human desires. What will it do to art? Will art remain humanity's last line of defense against the rise of the all-knowing algorithms? In the modern world, art is usually associated with human emotions.

An automated face detection method developed at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to recognize faces in images at a variety of scales, including tiny faces composed of just a handful of pixels. Spotting a face in a crowd, or recognizing any small or distant object within a large image, is a major challenge for computer vision systems. The trick to finding tiny objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is to look for larger things associated with them. An improved method for coding that crucial context from an image has enabled Deva Ramanan, associate professor of robotics, and Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. student in robotics, to demonstrate a significant advance in detecting tiny faces. When applied to benchmarked datasets of faces, their method reduced error by a factor of two, and 81 percent of the faces found using their methods proved to be actual faces, compared with 29 to 64 percent for prior methods.

In this study an Artificial Neural Network was trained to classify musical instruments, using audio samples transformed to the frequency domain. Different features of the sound, in both time and frequency domain, were analyzed and compared in relation to how much information that could be derived from that limited data. The study concluded that in comparison with the base experiment, that had an accuracy of 93.5%, using the attack only resulted in 80.2% and the initial 100 Hz in 64.2%.

I've been wondering some things about various neural network architectures and I have a question. Can all neural network architectures (recurrent, convolutional, GAN etc.) be described simply as a computational graph with fully connected layers where a subset of the trainable weights are clamped together (ie. Is there something missing in this description? Lots of different deep learning papers go on to great lengths to describe some sort of new neural network architecture and at a first glance, the differences can seem really huge. Some of the architectures seem to be only applicable to some domains and inherently, different than others.