Cory Doctorow, the popular science fiction author and journalist blogger, says he will be writing a lot less in order to focus on his digital activism work in fighting Digital Rights Management (DRM) laws alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He was speaking at a recent event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Artist Talks series, on the topic of how museums and libraries can "shape conversations about civic participation and cultural citizenship." He said that museums and libraries employ lots of highly skilled archivists and that they should be taught some software engineering skills to help take their work into digital realms. The fight for HTML5: 'Keep DRM out' lobby steps up standards battle A group of 27 organisations - including the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - have written to the web standards body W3C urging it to reject proposals that would make it easier to support DRM-protected media in HTML5-based sites. He warned that the Internet of Things and new electronics products such as a connected smart rectal thermometer would allow the government to spy inside our bodies.

Google is hiring writers from the farcical newspaper the Onion and the computer animation film studio Pixar to humanize its Assistant AI voice service, a Wall Street Journal report said. Google's new Pixel phone, which will hit stores Oct. 21, will be the first device to feature its Assistant voice service. After Amazon launched its AI voice service, Alexa, it found that people spoke to it as if it were a person. AI in its current form isn't really artificial intelligence since the device doesn't understand the conversation. Google is hiring writers from the Onion and Pixar to "infuse personality" to its voice service, Gummi Hafsteinsson, product-management director of Google Home, told WSJ Sunday.

Kurosawa-inspired bickering buddies C-3PO and R2-D2 have been bleep-blooping benevolently across our screens for nearly four decades, and the ranks of kindly machine heroes have been boosted in more recent times by Brad Bird's Iron Giant, Pixar's Wall-E and Baymax from Disney's Big Hero Six. One moment a high-flying corporate executive at Detroit's top mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products, the next splayed out on a display table, body peppered with automatic gunfire, after getting on the wrong side of the latest (if not necessarily greatest) in automated policing, Robocop's mighty Ed209. Paul Verhoeven's searing 1987 satire on corporate greed imagined a future in which the replacement of human beings with machines begins to spin horribly and inexorably out of control. Not according to killer robot expert Bonnie Docherty of Harvard University, who wrote recently that military robots with the ability to fire on targets independently of human control are swiftly moving towards reality thanks to rapid improvements in artificial intelligence. See also: The Terminator, Yul Brynner's Gunslinger from the 1973 Westworld movie.

It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). The tune was created by Flow Machines, a system Sony taught to make music by feeding it 13,000 samples from different genres. Although the software is capable of creating the lead sheet, a human composer instructed it to produce a record in the style of The Beatles and wrote the lyrics. It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Sony has taught its AI, Flow Machines, how to compose music.

MOSCOW--When Russian clubgoers flocked to the country's biggest electronic music festival this summer, they didn't have to bring a camera or even their phones. Instead, festival organizers used facial-identification technology to pick out revelers and send them their pictures directly to their phone. All they needed to do was opt in, by sending a selfie. The technology is the product of NTechLab, a Moscow-based firm whose algorithm to identify facial features is getting attention in the broader information technology world. NTechLab co-founders Artem Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov believe the possible uses of their technology are almost endless, and mostly positive: from allowing police to search for criminals in real time, to helping amusement parks identify and sell photos to their guests.

It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). The tune was created by Flow Machines, a system Sony taught to make music by feeding it 13,000 samples from different genres. Although the software is capable of creating the lead sheet, a human composer instructed it to produce a record in the style of The Beatles and wrote the lyrics. It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Sony has taught its AI, Flow Machines, how to compose music.

We introduce a Maximum Entropy model able to capture the statistics of melodies in music. The model can be used to generate new melodies that emulate the style of the musical corpus which was used to train it. Instead of using the $n-$body interactions of $(n-1)-$order Markov models, traditionally used in automatic music generation, we use a $k-$nearest neighbour model with pairwise interactions only. In that way, we keep the number of parameters low and avoid over-fitting problems typical of Markov models. We show that long-range musical phrases don't need to be explicitly enforced using high-order Markov interactions, but can instead emerge from multiple, competing, pairwise interactions. We validate our Maximum Entropy model by contrasting how much the generated sequences capture the style of the original corpus without plagiarizing it. To this end we use a data-compression approach to discriminate the levels of borrowing and innovation featured by the artificial sequences. The results show that our modelling scheme outperforms both fixed-order and variable-order Markov models. This shows that, despite being based only on pairwise interactions, this Maximum Entropy scheme opens the possibility to generate musically sensible alterations of the original phrases, providing a way to generate innovation.

The great gathering of genre fans in the city that never sleeps is officially over. New York Comic-Con has closed its doors after a weekend of surprise comic book cameos, never-before-seen TV premieres and geeky celebrations. But the pictures of the cosplay at NYCC will live on forever, because the East Coast convention goers gave great costume this year. Here's a collection of a few of our favorite costumes, should you dare to be inspired this Halloween season. Jessica Jones in the scarcely cosplayed version of her (now retired) alter superhero character Jewel, Luke Cage in Power Man attire, and Marvel's brand new Iron Man character Riri Williams.

On a Monday when the nation at large is suffering democracy hangover, a small fraction are also recovering from New York Comic Con. The four-day conference held in Manhattan over the weekend brought together science fiction and fantasy fans to celebrate the best of film, television and books. Mashable was all over this smorgasbord of geekery, and we picked our favorite panel revelations from the weekend's offerings. SEE ALSO: From page to screen and back: Fan culture's huge impact on New York Comic Con "I like them, I do," Brown said at "Inside the Upside Down," a panel she shared with David Harbour, who plays Sheriff Hopper. "I do not like how many I eat...it's actually really hard to digest."