He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience. Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money. His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries--that the present isn't all that different from the past.

Do they miss you when you're away on business? Can they put on a VR headset without their parents' help? That last one is pretty important. The year is zipping by, but before we launch full-force into next month, there's just about enough time for a quick roundup of the best updates and launches in April. It was recently revealed that Google was testing a new app for travelers, and now we have a better idea of what it might do.

Raibert has been designing walking robots since 1980, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved the research group to MIT. When I visited the company in 2003, he showed me a video of mountain goats clambering easily up steep terrain and pointed out that "a large part of the earth's surface is inaccessible to vehicles that have wheels or [tank treads]. Yet people and animals can go to all of those places." Boston Dynamics's primary customer was the Pentagon's advanced research arm, known as DARPA. BigDog was pitched as a kind of robotic "pack mule" that would help soldiers carry heavy gear on terrain that was hostile to Humvees.

A workaholic moderate, who set aside dreams of a storybook inauguration to pursue a diplomatic career, meets a hopelessly single-issue candidate chasing his last shot at relevance. Throw in a wacky, albeit divided, party and an amorous ex-President who dredges up all kinds of unpleasant memories, and you have the sleeper hit of the season! Thematically, this film is underscored by decades of entrenched sexism and anti-socialism, though the talking points are the same as the 2008 original. "The Best (No, Seriously) the Greatest-Ever Exotic Marigold Hotel--I Mean It, It's Classy" A group of disenfranchised retirees book a stay at a destination resort built by a famed real-estate developer. But they soon discover that he didn't actually build it himself but licensed his name to the project.

I recently gave a talk about recommender systems at the Data Science Sydney meetup (the slides are available here). This post roughly follows the outline of the talk, expanding on some of the key points in non-slide form (i.e., complete sentences and paragraphs!). The first few sections give a broad overview of the field and the common recommendation paradigms, while the final part is dedicated to debunking five common myths about recommender systems. The key reason why many people seem to care about recommender systems is money. For companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, recommender systems drive significant engagement and revenue. But this is the more cynical view of things.

Hans Zimmer asks the question: "What if I could define a character in one note?" He spends his days running "experiments" and processing "Big Data" (the imaginary world painted in the film's script, his cultural and artistic background, etc.) using the distributed neuronal network architecture of his innate biological computer and extracts "models" comprised of emotionally-stirring themes full of rich patterns, context, and meaning "visualized" through the auditory medium (the Score) that either makes or breaks the ability of a producer/director to tell a story. Now, in order for his patterns to be effective in communicating the thematic message, they must strike a fundamentally common cultural chord within the audience that responds to the thematic information being conveyed, perhaps through some kind of shared library of archetypal cultural-emotional reference points (a shared prior), that facilitates some kind of visceral mutual appreciation. One might think of the universe of all possible scores for a film being embedded into some kind of high dimensional space that also contains the score of interest (like the sculpture already present in the marble), and Hans essentially exploring this musical space through'experiments' to find that subspace of specific themes that have a high degree of correlation with the various elements of the film. In a sense, he uses both a bayesian approach relying on his vast prior knowledge of themes, motifs, etc., a dimension-reduction approach by whittling away inessential elements, and adding raw innovations to identify those particular threads that have the best correspondence to the action in a particular scene.

More than a week after his death, Prince is everywhere. Artists the world over counted him as an influence and mentor, and Japan is no exception. When news of Prince's death broke, Japanese musicians, from pop idols to rappers, tweeted their goodbyes. But what a lot of people may not realize is that Prince also had profoundly affected one of the most bizarre comic and anime franchises Japan has ever produced – a series called, appropriately enough, "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure." The series isn't quite as popular as titles like "One Piece" or "Dragon Ball Z," but it has been running since 1985, spawned video game and novel spinoffs and produced a serious cult following.

Once your business is no longer the innovative upstart and you become the establishment entity, how do you maintain an entrepreneurial and disruptive spirit that gets results? That's the question Apple had to ask itself this week, following an iffy earnings report. This week, Apple posted the earnings results for the second quarter of 2016, and reported a year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the first time in 13 years. The company took in 50.6 billion in quarterly revenue and 10.5 billion in quarterly net income. On a call with investors, CEO Tim Cook characterized that 13 percent dip in revenue as a "pause in our growth," that had stemmed from "ongoing macroeconomic headwinds in much of the world." Despite the break in the company's decade plus streak of "record" growth, it's unlikely that the tech giant's standing as one of most valuable and authentic brands in the world will be dinged in any significant way.

Yesterday morning I woke up, put on a pot of coffee, and checked the news. I wanted to revisit the New Hampshire primary results that had rolled in the night before. I opened Quartz's new app and was greeted with a text message: "Yep, it's really happening: Trump and Sanders won big in New Hampshire." Below it appeared side-by-side portraits of Trump's scowl and Bernie's grin. To read more, I tapped a ready-made text reply containing a donkey, an elephant, and an American flag emoji.

In recent blogs, I wrote about using codified narrative as a form of data. I also discussed using attribution models to systematically evaluate codified narrative for ontological constructs: e.g. I provide a brief overview of these topics a bit later in the blog. The third important piece to make use of narrative data involves "attribution profiling" in a process that I call "catching scent." Following the odour of data involves establishing a scent and then searching for it. After attribution models create profiles from the codified narrative, I have the search engine hunt for similar profiles. I don't consider the process particularly original or creative.