Many spectral unmixing methods rely on the non-negative decomposition of spectral data onto a dictionary of spectral templates. In particular, state-of-the-art music transcription systems decompose the spectrogram of the input signal onto a dictionary of representative note spectra. The typical measures of fit used to quantify the adequacy of the decomposition compare the data and template entries frequency-wise. As such, small displacements of energy from a frequency bin to another as well as variations of timber can disproportionally harm the fit. We address these issues by means of optimal transportation and propose a new measure of fit that treats the frequency distributions of energy holistically as opposed to frequency-wise. Building on the harmonic nature of sound, the new measure is invariant to shifts of energy to harmonically-related frequencies, as well as to small and local displacements of energy. Equipped with this new measure of fit, the dictionary of note templates can be considerably simplified to a set of Dirac vectors located at the target fundamental frequencies (musical pitch values). This in turns gives ground to a very fast and simple decomposition algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on real musical data.

Scriptbook is an algorithm that claims it can predict whether a movie is going to be a hit or a miss at the box office. Inspired by the dismal performance of "Gigli" starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the turn of the century, Scriptbook's CEO Nadira Azermai and her team spent over a year creating the machine-learning platform that claims to be able to predict the relative success of a film using its script. With the data from 4,000 scripts and 10,000 movies, ScriptBook uses 220 parameters to automatically read and score scripts, and then produce an estimated financial performance calculation. If ScriptBook is proved to work -- even partially -- the impact on the movie industry could be substantial. According to Forbes, losses from flops in 2016 come out at around $100.9 million.

Artificial intelligence (AI) made incredible strides in 2016, and the growth appears set to accelerate as we enter the New Year. A team of Microsoft researchers has released a dataset of 100,000 questions and answers that other AI researchers can use – for free – in their quest to create systems that can read and answer questions as well as a human. The MS MARCO dataset is based on anonymized real-world data from Bing and Cortana queries and is part of an attempt to spur the breakthroughs in machine reading that are already happening in image and speech recognition. The move is also aimed at facilitating advances toward "artificial general intelligence," or machines that can think like humans – and can read and understand a document as well as a person. Meanwhile, AI helped a musician in Norway sing a new tune for the holidays this year: a Christmas carol that was created by Microsoft's AI technology.

I want to create music generated by mathematical algorithms, or even turning big data files into sound files, just like NASA turned electromagnetic signals from space into music. Producing artificially generated music is a popular subject, see for instance Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks, or Using Machine Learning to Generate Music. My question is how to access my laptop's speaker from a script written in Python or Perl. I used to do it long ago in C language, using the command sound available in the Borland package. Today I tried various system calls from within Perl, or directly from the command line, to non avail.

Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL phones come with some pretty awesome features. Google's new smart Assistant, unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos and it has one of the highest rated smartphone cameras. Here's a guide on how to make the most out of your new Google Pixel phone. Google Assistant is one of the best features of the new Pixel phones. You can use it on Google's new messaging app Allo and on the Google Home speaker.

What were the main advances in machine learning/artificial intelligence in 2016? Everyone now seems to be doing machine learning, and if they are not, they are thinking of buying a startup to claim they do. Now, to be fair, there are reasons for much of that "hype". Can you believe that it has been only a year since Google announced they were open sourcing Tensor Flow? TF is already a very active project that is being used for anything ranging from drug discovery to generating music.

In the Star Wars movies Doctors and medical droids are able to replace limbs with artificial prosthetics that are as good or even better than the original limb. Which is a good thing because in a place that is packed with lightsabers it's not surprising that a lot of people lose their limbs. To me it seems like picking up a saber the wrong way can result in a loss of hand or leg. The most notable lost limbs belong to the Skywalkers. Luke's hand was cut off by Vader at the end of the Empire Strikes Back and is probably the most famous.

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By using this "Contrivance," "the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, with the least Assistance from Genius or study." Bayesian inference will become a leading approach in machine learning. The boat was equipped with, as Tesla described, "a borrowed mind." The word "robot" comes from the word "robota" (work). It features a robot double of a peasant girl, Maria, which unleashes chaos in Berlin of 2026--it was the first robot depicted on film, inspiring the Art Deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars.

Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to triple in 2017 according to Forrester research, as brands tap into the potential of machine learning and look to take a leading position on the'Internet of Things' (IoT). Amazon and Google have already entered the fray with the launch of their connected home devices – Echo and Home – exhibiting the emerging power of voice to order services online and set personalised alerts based on users' previous behaviour. The rise of the'zero user interface', whereby people reduce their interactions with screens in favour of speaking directly to faceless machines, is set to redefine how brands communicate with consumers. Expect to see the growing importance of AI in CRM systems following the unveiling of Salesforce's Einstein software, which boasts predictive capabilities based on previous customer interactions. Rapid adoption of chatbot technology will continue apace, led by Facebook's roll-out of news feed ads that open directly into Messenger chats and hybrid products such as Google Allo, a smart messaging app with an integrated AI assistant.