A 42-year-old man in Hong Kong spent 50,000 to realize a childhood dream: making a robot modeled on a Hollywood star, Reuters reports. Jezebel concurs, writing, "It does look just enough like Johansson for her to maybe want to consider taking out a restraining order." Still--after a year and a half of work, including teaching himself programming and electromechanics--Ma isn't letting anyone bring him down. "If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," he tells Reuters, which has photos and video of his creation. Ma built the Mark 1 on the balcony of his apartment. It was a largely lonely experience.

Theme park fans are in for a treat when Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey officially opens on Thursday inside Hogwarts Castle at Universal Studios Hollywood. For those who have never been on the world's best dark ride, Forbidden Journey literally turns the traditional dark ride experience on its head by placing riders on the end of a unique robotic arm as they travel past domed projection screens and animatronic characters. For those who have visited Universal's Islands of Adventure, the West Coast version of Forbidden Journey adds 3-D imagery to the domed screen segments that were only 2-D when the ride debuted in 2010 at the Florida theme park. Candlesticks float above riders aboard Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood. Candlesticks float above riders aboard Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood.

A Hong Kong man has built a robot version of Scarlett Johansson in his flat. Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old designer, has poured more than 34,000 and over a year of work into the catchily-named'Mark 1' humanoid robot. Speaking to Reuters, Ma said he decided to model the Mark 1's appearance on a Hollywood star. He didn't say which, but it's fair to assume Scarlett Johansson may have given him a lot of inspiration. The robot can move its limbs, alter its facial expressions, and even reply when spoken to by Ma through a microphone. Mark 1 has a special talent for responding to compliments.

Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate.

It's been fascinating to watch the storm over Microsoft's AI Twitter chat bot, Tay, which learned extreme racism, homophobia, and drug culture from internet trolls and was hastily taken offline. As one commentator put, it went from saying "humans are super cool", to extolling Nazi values in less than 24 hours – a useful analog of extremism's connection with ignorance in a meme-propelled culture. But were trolls solely to blame? As journalist Paul Mason noted in his Guardian blog, Tay was essentially feeding off the deep undercurrents of prejudice and hate speech that lurk near the surface of many social platforms. Or at least they do in the West.

Peter Brand, the fictional sports analyst in the movie Moneyball, was portrayed to be the stereotypical nerdy number cruncher. This makes a good story line in a movie, but the real life architect of the Oakland A's analytical success in baseball, Paul DePodesta, required more than number crunching ability to succeed. He played both varsity football and baseball at Harvard, worked as a professional baseball scout and later became a general manager in Major League Baseball. Paul exemplifies the "unicorn" that businesses seek as analytics professionals. The term "unicorn," a mythical creature that does not exist, is used to describe the individual that can bridge the gap between the world of technology and the world of practical application. To succeed as an Analytics Professional, one must possess a broad set of skills and personal attributes beyond the technical tool kit.

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists. "A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

The idea is ridiculously simple (perhaps why it is effective?): I don't understand the claim "Remember all the narratives we told about how depth learns hierarchical representations, and higher level representations -- those higher level representations don't seem to matter so much after all.". The net has over 100 layers!?! I imagine that this also works reasonably well in the RNN encoder in an encoder/decoder framework. I wonder if it also applies to generative RNNs.

A humanoid obsessive has built an incredibly realistic female robot from scratch - and it's got more than a passing resemblance to Avengers star Scarlett Johansson. Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old product and graphic designer, has spent more than 50,000 ( 34,000) and a year and a half creating the female robot prototype, Mark 1. The designer confirmed the scarily lifelike humanoid had been modelled on a Hollywood star, but wanted to keep her name under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions, but Ricky says creating it wasn't easy.

I have been trying to use ML for sentiment analysis of sentences, I have been successful with Naive Bayes and SVM but I would like to implement Neural Networks for Sentiment Analysis but couldn't find a way to convert words as input for neural networks. I know that representing word as a numerical is not efficient. How is nlpnet implemented, I tried to understand that but that flew over my head.