Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gathering pace as one of the biggest ICT trends of our time – and the topic of "robot journalism" provides important insight on how AI is being applied to industry. How is natural language generation (NLG) being used to explain big data in narrative form that broader audiences can easily understand? What insights are being found by machines producing 2,000 articles per second? How are some of the world's biggest media agencies currently using vendors that provide these solutions to build their reach, engagement, and businesses? Will "robots" (or automated content) soon render journalists obsolete?

Tony Jebara is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and Director of Machine Learning Research at Netflix. His research intersects computer science and statistics to develop new frameworks for learning from data with applications in social networks, spatio-temporal data, vision and text. At the Deep Learning Summit in Boston, on April 2016, Tony presented'Double-Cover Inference in Deep Belief Networks'. I caught up with him to hear more about his work at Netflix and his thoughts on the recent advancements in deep learning. Tell us more about your work as Director of Machine Learning Research at Netflix.

Contagions such as the spread of popular news stories, or infectious diseases, propagate in cascades over dynamic networks with unobservable topologies. However, "social signals" such as product purchase time, or blog entry timestamps are measurable, and implicitly depend on the underlying topology, making it possible to track it over time. Interestingly, network topologies often "jump" between discrete states that may account for sudden changes in the observed signals. The present paper advocates a switched dynamic structural equation model to capture the topology-dependent cascade evolution, as well as the discrete states driving the underlying topologies. Conditions under which the proposed switched model is identifiable are established. Leveraging the edge sparsity inherent to social networks, a recursive $\ell_1$-norm regularized least-squares estimator is put forth to jointly track the states and network topologies. An efficient first-order proximal-gradient algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real cascades measured over the span of one year are conducted, and test results corroborate the efficacy of the advocated approach.

Mumbai: There is tremendous buzz around machine learning, broadly described as a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. However, despite an exponential increase in power, computers have typically proved incompetent at things that are really simple to human beings--like recognizing the dog in a picture containing a dog, or understanding speech. The trend, however, is changing. Consider'Deep Learning', which describes a collection of techniques that allow computational tasks that were previously thought impossible. Facebook Inc, for instance, uses it to identify faces, and when Google Inc recently announced that their algorithms could not only'see' a dog but also identify it as a Pomeranian, they heralded the maturity of Deep Learning techniques.

The official Mojang blog had a concrete release date for the film today: May 24, 2019. It'll release in 3D and IMAX, but that's just about all we know about the movie at this time. Vu Bui, COO of Mojang, notes that it does seem like quite a long time away, but it "just so happens to be the right amount of time to make it completely awesome" while promising "loads more" will be shared soon. Minecraft continues to be a tour-de-force, with the newly-launched Battle mini game a success and Minecraft Realms, the paid multiplayer server hosting service out there in the wild for players being introduced for mobile players. What could a movie version of Minecraft bring? We'll have to wait a few Memorial Day holidays to see.

Last year Hrayr used convolutional networks to identify spoken language from short audio recordings for a TopCoder contest and got 95% accuracy. After the end of the contest we decided to try recurrent neural networks and their combinations with CNNs on the same task. The best combination allowed to reach 99.24% and an ensemble of 33 models reached 99.67%. As before, the inputs of the networks are spectrograms of speech recordings. It seems spectrograms are the standard way to represent audio for deep learning systems (see "Listen, Attend and Spell" and "Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin").

Cozmo is a 179 artificially intelligent robot that can recognize faces and react to human gestures. SAN FRANCISCO – At first glance, the palm-sized toy on the table looks unexceptional, an odd cross between a bulldozer and a forklift. Except that the toy is snoring. Suddenly, it wakes up, motors over to its human inquisitor and lets out a happy squawk as its digital eyes go wide. Made by Anki, the start-up that has found success with its self-driving Anki Drive racing cars, Cozmo goes on sale today for 179 with orders shipping this fall.

Morgan is the debut directorial effort from Ridley Scott's son Luke Scott, a sci-fi thriller that's being promoted with a new trailer running in advance of Independence Day: Resurgence. Who -- or what -- is Morgan, exactly? She's an artificial being that's evolving more rapidly than her creators can comprehend, and she's not responding to continued confinement very well. What middle schooler wants to be locked in their room all day? She doesn't even have a computer or a game console in there.)

AI and Machine Learning have emerged as a central aspect of analytics which is applied to multiple domains. AI and Machine Learning, Pattern classifiers and natural language processing (NLP) underpin Sentiment Analysis (SA); SA is a technology that makes rapid assessment of the sentiments expressed in news releases as well as other media sources such as Twitter and blogs. This conference addresses and explains how to extract sentiment from these multiple sources of information and showcases the advances that have taken place in the field of financial innovation. This conference builds on the findings of the six previous highly-regarded conferences on this topic. It highlights the recent developments in the application of AI and machine learning to trading strategies including automatic and algorithmic trading, quantitative fund management.

Not in that gadget-y way, like when a laptop screen turns on, though. The robot slowly raises its head and opens one eye, then the other, as if the light of the world is just too much. Sofman, CEO of robotics company Anki, chuckles as the it shakes off the rust of sleep and ambles off its charging cradle. After circling the table a moment, it drives quickly to the edge. It only pauses once it's driven halfway off.