In 2011, a caustic British comedy writer named Charlie Brooker debuted a drama series that took some absurd premises about near-future technology and played them straight. It was funny to Brooker, but terrifyingly real to the rest of us. Despite only screening two seasons and six episodes -- each a one-off story -- the show became a cult hit in the UK. When it reached the U.S. via Netflix in 2013, it invaded American brains too (even before the 2014 Christmas special starring Jon Hamm). At this point the show has burrowed into our collective consciousness, and our collective conscience, like a robotic insect.

If talking to Siri, Cortana and Alexa aren't cutting it for you, know that researchers are looking for a way to spice things up with characters from popular TV shows. A team of researchers at the University of Leeds--James Charles, Derek Magee and David Hogg--have turned to algorithms and machine learning tools for digitizing avatars of well known characters. The algorithms will have the ability to identify specific characters and catch individual facial expressions, speech patterns, body language and voice. Then, a machine learning tool will analyze scripts to learn how the character pieces words together. The final result will be a "virtually immortalized" version of the character that can create new sentences in the style and appearance of the character.

"There's a one in a billion chance that this is reality." There is a growing school of thought in the scientific community that we are all living inside a computer simulation designed by a super-advanced civilization. This is not some fringe idea dreamed up by a weed-smoking wackadoodle in a psychedelic VW van. This is mainstream scientific theory. A who's who of world-renown philosophers and physicists spent hours discussing the controversial concept known as the simulation hypothesis at an annual event at the American Museum of Natural History earlier this year.

Apple is going all-in on artificial intelligence (AI). As it continues to work on Siri, its voice-activated digital assistant, a new interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook sheds a bit of light on just how far the company is willing to go to make Siri a central part of your life. Speaking to Nikkei, Cook waxed philosophical about Siri's intended abilities, saying "AI is horizontal" and should reach across all products. He said the technology should be able to do things like help you manage battery life, recommend music to Apple Music subscribers, and tell you where you parked your car. Cook also discussed Apple's incoming Yokohama research and development center, where it intends to focus on machine learning and AI.

Are you just trying to identify (classify) one of your 50 individuals from a new photo, or are you specifically looking to create an embedding representation that can be used to differentiate individuals not in your training set? For classification purposes that might be enough data (esp. For an embedding to differentiate arbitrary individuals not in the training set, I think you'd need a lot more data. It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison since different models are trained on different datasets, but nonetheless note the significant gain in accuracy of DeepFace and VGGFace over OpenFace, despite having slightly fewer individuals in the training set... it seems that it's the number of photos (as well as model differences) that's making the difference, and maybe that 0.6M (600,000) photos just isn't enough for this domain.

Colorization of grayscale images is a simple task for the human imagination. Researchers from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and University of Chicago developed a fully automatic image colorization system using deep learning and GPUs. Their paper mentions previous approaches required some level of user input. Using a TITAN X GPU, they trained their deep neural network to predict hue and chroma distributions for each pixel given its hypercolumn descriptor. The predicted distributions then determine color assignment at test time.

Musk is a mad scientist unrestrained because the federal government has yet to implement Federal Motor Vehicle Safety standards requiring performance standards of new autonomous vehicles. This psycho-killer is the poster child for why we need rules for the cars before they hit the roads, not a 15 point check list that could be turned in to regulators on a toilet paper roll right now.

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." In 1964, the Supreme Court overturned an obscenity conviction against Nico Jacobellis, a Cleveland theater manager accused of distributing obscene material. The film in question was Louis Malle's "The Lovers," starring Jeanne Moreau as a French housewife who, bored with her media-mogul husband and her polo-playing sidepiece, packs up and leaves after a hot night with a younger man. And by "hot," I mean a lot of artful blocking, heavy breathing and one fleeting nipple -- basically, nothing you can't see on cable TV.

Weber Shandwick's report AI-Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence here we come!, released this week, shows that top global marketers believe AI will have an even bigger impact on comms than social media. Gorkana asks Weber and other agencies, including Firefly, Hotwire PR and Babel, what they think about the AI'revolution'. According to Weber Shandwick's report, AI is defined as the following: "[AI] is a field of technology designed to create computers, machines and software that are as smart as humans, and which are able to perform the same tasks that normally require human intelligence." It surveyed 150 chief marketing officers across the UK, US and China and more than half of them (55%) expect AI to have'a greater impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had'. Nearly six in ten (58%) of respondents believe that within the next five years companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed. Furthermore, 68% of the CMOs reported that their company is currently selling, using or planning for business in the AI area.

Much of the internet appears to be broken. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter. Dyn runs domain name servers or DNS. They work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information.