Media
This sci-fi film was shot entirely by autonomous drones
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young, In the Robot Skies claims to be the first narrative fiction film shot entirely by autonomous, pre-programmed drones. But the lack of human camera operators is more than just a headline grabbing gimmick. The film, which premieres in October at the London Film Festival, revolves around an age-old love story set in a near-future police state where the drones themselves play an integral role. Young and fiction author Tim Maughan imagined the story to explore the "drone as a cultural object" -- one that can be both oppressive and liberating as it eventually breeds new urban subcultures. While the film may not be the first drone-shot sci-fi flick, some of the themes are strikingly close to becoming reality.
A 'galaxy' of sound: L.A.'s King makes R&B on its own terms
Based in Los Angeles, this crafty R&B trio writes, performs and produces its own music, a rare instance of artistic autonomy in a world defined by behind-the-scenes direction. What's more, twin sisters Paris and Amber Strother and their friend Anita Bias handle the business side of their band as well. When King was ready to release its debut album -- this year's tender and spacey "We Are King," recorded at the group's own pace at Paris Strother's home studio -- it didn't turn to an established label or even a tech giant like Apple, as singer Frank Ocean did recently with his long-awaited "Blond." Instead, the women put the record out themselves, through their company King Creative. "We're just doing what comes naturally," said Paris Strother, who plays instruments and produces while her sister and Bias sing.
'Miss Peregrine' expected to top 'Deepwater Horizon' and 'Magnificent Seven' at the box office
Tim Burton's new movie about an orphanage for fantastically gifted kids is expected to debut at the head of its class at the box office this weekend, expelling last week's victor, "The Magnificent Seven," from the top of the charts. "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," from 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment, is expected to gross 25 million to 30 million in its opening in the U.S. and Canada through Sunday, according to people who have reviewed prerelease audience surveys. That should be enough to unseat Sony and MGM's western remake (starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt) that bowed to 35 million and is expected to drop about 50% in its second go-around. "Miss Peregrine," adapted from the popular fantasy novel by Ransom Riggs, cost 110 million to make. Though it boasts high interest and parallels to the X-Men and Harry Potter series, it remains to be seen if the film will prove popular enough to start a Hollywood franchise.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rapper struck by errant drone during concert
Please enjoy today's installment of Drones Behaving Badly. An errant drone crashed into rapper Stanley "Flesh-N-Bone" Howse during Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's performance at the High Life Music Festival on Sunday, according to the Associated Press. Luckily, Howse appeared to be unharmed, despite briefly grabbing his head, and the show went on as planned. At the time of writing, the drone's owner and intended use remain unknown. 'Havana Moon' will let fans experience the Rolling Stones' historic Cuban concert Denzel Washington and Viola Davis stand by each other in'Fences' trailer'Battlefield 1' story mode sounds a lot like'Band of Brothers'
You Too Can Become a Machine Learning Rock Star! No PhD Necessary.
If you are a strong-armed NFL quarterback who reads defenses like genre fiction, a movie star whose name alone can open a film in China, or a stock picker who beats Buffet every time, congratulations: you are almost as valuable as a data scientist or machine learning engineer with a PhD from Stanford, MIT, or Carnegie Mellon. At least it seems that way. Every company in Silicon Valley -- increasingly, every company everywhere -- is frantically competing for those human prizes, in a human resources version of a truffle hunt. As businesses now realize that their competitiveness relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, job openings for those trained in the field well exceed all the people in the world who aren't locked up by Facebook, Google, and other superpowers. But what if you could get the benefits of AI without having to hire those hard-to-find and expensive-to-woo talents?
Machine Learning Security - Cyber Talk Radio Episode 1
This past Saturday, September 24th, the first episode of Cyber Talk Radio hit the airwaves on 1200 WOAI and iHeartRadio streaming. To open the discussion we covered a machine learning background including mentions of TensorFlow, Watson, Tay, and many other examples of consumer facing AI as well as developer tools to build your own systems. After establishing a baseline we started to discuss the impact machine learning (aka. When the internet began you'd directly connect to it just like a big "home network" from a trust perspective. As more people connected and port scanners such as nmap became available the need for a firewall appeared.
First Clinton-Trump matchup breaks presidential debate record with about 84 million TV viewers
The contentious first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump lived up to its big ratings expectations with an estimated average TV viewership that will top the previous record of 80.6 million. The total average audience for Monday's matchup for the ad-supported broadcast and cable networks as well as PBS came in at about 84 million, according to Nielsen numbers. Monday's faceoff tops the previous record for a presidential debate set when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan clashed on Oct. 28, 1980. It was their only meeting of that year's presidential campaign, which occurred in an era when U.S. households had only a handful of channels to choose from. The total across broadcast and cable networks measured by Nielsen for the Clinton-Trump debate does not include viewers who watched the debate through various video streams available online.
Denzel Washington and Viola Davis enter Oscar race with 'Fences' trailer
Even before production began on "Fences" in April, many awards season pundits already had the film's stars on their lists of likely Oscar nominees. On Tuesday, we got to see why, when Paramount Pictures put out the first trailer for the movie starring Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, who also served as the film's director. Of course, the Broadway production of "Fences" has long been a critical darling. August Wilson, who wrote the play and adapted it for the big screen, won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1987. That year, "Fences" also swept the Tony Awards, winning for best play, direction, featured actress (Mary Alice) and leading actor (James Earl Jones).
Kaggle Ensembling Guide
Model ensembling is a very powerful technique to increase accuracy on a variety of ML tasks. In this article I will share my ensembling approaches for Kaggle Competitions. For the first part we look at creating ensembles from submission files. The second part will look at creating ensembles through stacked generalization/blending. I answer why ensembling reduces the generalization error. Finally I show different methods of ensembling, together with their results and code to try it out for yourself. This is how you win ML competitions: you take other peoples' work and ensemble them together." The most basic and convenient way to ensemble is to ensemble Kaggle submission CSV files. You only need the predictions on the test set for these methods -- no need to retrain a model. This makes it a quick way to ensemble already existing model predictions, ideal when teaming up. Let's see why model ensembling reduces error rate and why it works better to ensemble low-correlated model ...
DJI's New Drone Is Small Enough to Carry in a Backpack
Chinese drone company DJI unveiled Tuesday a new model that it claims is nearly as compact as a water bottle when packed up. The Mavic Pro, shipping on Oct. 15 for 999, is debuting a week after action camera company GoPro unveiled its long-awaited Karma drone, which also folds up for easy transportation. The Mavic Pro's arms and propellors fold alongside its body, making it possible to fit in a backpack or purse, DJI says. DJI's focus on portability extends to the Mavic's controller as well, which is smaller and can be used with or without a smartphone to display live video from the aircraft. DJI will be selling the Mavic Pro without its controller for 749 and a combination package which includes the drone, two extra batteries, extra propellors, a charging hub, an adapter, and a shoulder bag for 1,299. Those who just want the drone and its controller can opt for the 999 deal.