This week's milestones in the history of technology include the invention of the telephone, automating telephone exchanges and textile weaving, and the idea of searching for information through associative links. The first-ever nationally televised awards ceremony devoted to the Internet is broadcast. U.S. patent 174,465 for "Improvement in telegraphy" is issued to 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell. This was the patent for his invention of the telephone, covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound." E-book publisher Rosetta Books wins the lawsuit brought against it by Random House for acquiring titles directly from authors.

Northeastern University professor Mauro Martino is one of the minds behind IBM's Watson News Explorer, a dashboard that allows users to explore the themes surfacing across the news ecosystem. Martino spoke last week at NUVis, Northeastern's Visualization Consortium seminar series, about his work with artificial intelligence -- or machine learning, as he prefers to call it -- and visualization as a path to "accelerate human knowledge." An award-winning design artist and director at the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM, Martino shared many insights on how journalists and other professionals can offer more meaningful storytelling by marrying data visualization and artificial intelligence. Martino's research focuses on how information technology relates to exploration and the dissemination of knowledge. Through artificial intelligence and data visualization, he believes people can expand the reality in front of them with complex classification and connections that emerge from computer analysis.

HBO's Westworld features a common plot device--synthetic hosts rising up against their callous human creators. But is it more than just a plot twist? After all, smart people like Bill Gates and Steven Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence may be on a dangerous path and could threaten the survival of the human race. They're not the only ones worried. The Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament recently issued a report calling on the EU to require intelligent robots to be registered, in part so their ethical character can be assessed.

There are many newspapers available in the New York City area that cater to different segments of the population. This project focuses on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), an international newspaper with a high circulation in the New York area. For this project, I scraped details of articles over a three-week period in order to analyze some basic metrics of the newspaper as well as some of the topics that the WSJ focuses on. In total, the project encompassed a total of 4,126 articles from three consecutive weeks in August 2016. As a result of collecting these metrics, several interesting findings emerged.

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans' relationship to conscious machines. Whether it's Terminators or Cylons or servants like the "Star Trek" computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient--or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise. What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don't quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving.

Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio out of Montreal (home base). It's not a long segment - about 5 to 10 minutes every week - about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly on iHeart Radio, if you're interested in hearing more of me blathering away about what's going on in the digital world. I'm really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry DiMonte morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans' relationship to conscious machines. Whether it's Terminators or Cylons or servants like the "Star Trek" computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient--or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise. What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don't quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving.

Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create epic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce platforms.

Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create xustpic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.