We probably won't know for sure for years, so why not enjoy the present? There are two stories that keep coming to mind when I begin thinking about this show. The first is a classic novelette from 1941 called the Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon. In it, a scientist engineers live in a laboratory: tiny people called Neoterics. He accelerates their evolution, and messes with their world, killing them off indiscriminately.

So far, the algorithm seems to be doing a pretty good job. The images being produced aren't just otherworldly or psychedelic, like so many computer-generated images in the realm of machine learning, but straight-up spooky. For example, check out how the Nightmare Machine transformed an ordinary image of the Statue of Liberty into something out of Ghostbusters. Or how it makes a photo of the Louvre look like it's been transported to a terrible Parisian hellscape: More unsettling than these landscapes are the ghoulish algorithm-generated faces that the Nightmare Machine has churned out. To refine the algorithm, researchers are asking humans to vote on which faces are scariest.

Didn't click the link but didn't this paper come out a long time ago?

In a move that's guaranteed to inspire awe but is really just laying the foundation for the robot takeover Elon Musk has been warning us about, IBM's artificial intelligence program Watson has helped write some music. Alex Da Kid, a Grammy-winning producer, got all sorts of data from Watson that helped him craft the song "Not Easy," a collaboration with X Ambassadors, Elle King, and Wiz Khalifa. Watson AlchemyLanguage API helped by analyzing five years of natural language texts including New York Times front pages, Supreme Court rulings, Getty Museum statements, the most edited Wikipedia articles, popular movie synopses and more. Once Watson had learned the most significant cultural themes, Watson Tone Analyzer read news articles, blogs and tweets to find out what people felt about them. In addition to all of this fun stuff, Watson also analyzed lyrics from thousands of popular songs and the keys and chord progressions of those songs to create "an emotional fingerprint of music by year." Watson also ingested album art and used a "cognitive cloud-based app" called Watson Beat that, with artist input, helps put together a musical composition.

The ability to make music has always been a distinctly human trait. Yes, whales whistle and wolves howl, elephants use low-frequency rumbles to communicate and woodpeckers drum but none of them sound like Tina Turner or Leonard Cohen, able to command thousands of their species into packed stadiums or compel thousands of dollars to be charged up on iTunes. Plug-and-play machine learning data models that can instantly analyze information and provide intelligent insights? Yep, Microsoft has'em, it says. You would imagine that machines are similarly incapable of capturing the minds, hearts, and wallets of us humans.

The Microsoft Emotion API is based on state of the art research from Microsoft Research in computer vision and is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model trained to classify the facial expressions of people in videos and images. This is an attempt to explain how to apply the API for data-driven reporting. Let's be honest, the last and final debate was depressing. The negativity, the personal allegations, and Trump's Belzebub-like facial expressions made it difficult to stay up to 3:30am and watch this combat with my American wife, which resembled an old feisty couple close to divorce. However, the debate was a gold mine for computer assisted reporting. One of the APIs I recently stumbled across when talking to the research lab from Microsoft is a neat emotion video API.

IBM's Watson has upended any romantic notions of songwriting by making it a precise formula of inspiration, emotion, musical theory and trends. The AI system's new music algorithm, called "Beat," helped producer Alex da Kid create his first solo EP of four songs, the first of which, Not Easy (feat. X Ambassadors, Elle King and Wiz Khalifa), dropped on Friday. To be clear, IBM's bot didn't write the song, but rather generated "completely new musical scores" that da Kid (who produced singles by Dr. Dre, Rhianna and others) used as inspiration for the tunes. For Da Kid, the algorithms collected music cultural trends and over the last five years, including Nobel Prize speeches, Billboard song lyrics, movie synopses and more.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing maturity of cloud-based business software promise to dramatically change the role of the accountant over the next five to 10 years. Savvy professionals should already be reskilling themselves in anticipation of the shift in the market. The Finance Indaba is taking place today and tomorrow – it's the perfect platform for finance professionals to gear up and learn about the changing accounting world from leaders in the industry He says that the arrival of smart software bots, paired with the affordability of cloud-based business applications, will change the way that accountants work as vividly as the first spreadsheet and accounting software packages did. "Financial software is getting smarter, more affordable and easier to use, so more and more of the admin accountants typically do for the business is becoming automated," Cohen says. "What's more, intuitive software paired with AI and other new developments, could empower small business owners do more of the tasks they used to entrust to an accountant."

Discussion[Discussion] How Gaussian naïve Bayes forms a non-linear decision boundary? Also, please explain decision boundary for decision trees. If the two gaussians are non isotropic you can derive that the bound is quadratic/elliptic curve.

If you're more than a casual fan of either Steven Spielberg or Stanley Kubrick, then you likely know that the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence is basically a collaboration between the two filmmakers. Kubrick began working on the film in the 1970s and kept developing it through the 90s, mostly because he didn't believe technology would effectively allow him to create the lead character David in the way he wanted. In 1995, Kubrick handed the project to Steven Spielberg, who would run with it starting in 1999 following the death of the iconic director behind The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, when you look at some parts of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, it's almost as if Kubrick was looking over Spielberg's shoulder. There are some striking similarities in shots between the 2001 sci-fi film and Kubrick's previous work.