You probably knew this day was coming: A computer has made a pop song. No, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber (or the people who secretly write much of the stars' music) shouldn't fear for their jobs just yet. The song is the product of Flow Machines, a project from Sony's Paris-based Computer Science Laboratory to create music using artificial intelligence. According to Flow Machines' website, its AI analyzes a large database of 13,000 music samples, then gets programmed to compose a song in a certain style. In the case of the first track released, "Daddy's Car," the system was told to create music in the style of the Beatles. The result does have a soothing, poppy Beatles quality.

Indian laws need to be examined to better address the changes in technology. The explosion of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at its Cape Canaveral launch pad on September 1 and the crash of Tesla's driverless car in June are powerful reminders that while technology driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at a dizzying pace, regulators cannot lag behind. Although self-driving cars have not yet hit the Indian roads, app-based taxi aggregators such as Uber and Ola do operate in the country. We have all experienced the many benefits of AI – email spam filtering, web page translations and Facebook's auto recognition to tag friends and family in a photograph. A number of AI startups in India are helping people book cabs, order food, pay bills and recharge mobile phones.

Artificial Intelligence is the current buzzword and every major tech giant including Google, Facebook, IBM and others are investing heavily in it. At its annual IT conference Ignite, in Atlanta, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also spoke at length about AI and how Microsoft is focussing on this field and how it plans to leverage it in the future. Taking a slight dig at Google and IBM, Nadella said, "We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games." This was clearly in reference to the news reports of how Google's AI has been effective in defeating humans in Chinese board game Go as well as IBM's Watson defeating humans at Jeopardy. "We are pursuing AI, so that we can empower every person and every institution that people build with tools of AI. So that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy. That's the pursuit," said Nadella.

In order to create an artificial intelligence system like Flow Machines capable of composing music, programmers had to feed the program thousands and thousands of examples of sheet music from a large database. The sheet music in this database consisted of songs of varying styles. After Flow Machines analyzed all of the sheet music, a human composer gave the AI system a style prompt as a basis for a composition. Flow Machines was able to take that initial prompt and turn it into a complete melody and harmony.

In order to create an artificial intelligence system like Flow Machines capable of composing music, programmers had to feed the program thousands and thousands of examples of sheet music from a large database. The sheet music in this database consisted of songs of varying styles. After Flow Machines analyzed all of the sheet music, a human composer gave the AI system a style prompt as a basis for a composition. Flow Machines was able to take that initial prompt and turn it into a complete melody and harmony.

Earlier this week, Sony CSL research released the first ever pop song to be composed entirely by an AI system which is called Flow Machines. A human musician, a French composer named Benoit Carre produced, mixed, and wrote the lyrics for the song but the melody and harmony of the track were composed entirely by Flow Machines. In order to create an artificial intelligence system like Flow Machines capable of composing music, programmers had to feed the program thousands and thousands of examples of sheet music from a large database. The sheet music in this database consisted of songs of varying styles. After Flow Machines analyzed all of the sheet music, a human composer gave the AI system a style prompt as a basis for a composition.

It is part of a new breed of A.I. solutions that could change the way we do business forever. Fresh from the stage at NASDAQ Marketsite -- as part of AdWeek New York -- Steve Gold, CMO at IBM Watson, spoke with me about the future of A.I., machine-to-human interaction, and advertising technology. The first question most people ask about A.I. is, "Will it replace humans?" "What's interesting about job displacement, not only in A.I. but in technology in general, is it's the same conversation we've been having since the dawn of the computing age," Gold told me. "IBM mainframes created jobs, rather than removing them." And while some jobs will be replaced, just as they have been throughout the course of time, new roles appear every year.

We are living in a society where change is exponential - perhaps it has always been. What types of technologies will be foundational to our business? The disruption of Blockchain to data and databases parallels the disruption of the Internet to communications and networks. From Wall Street to Fintech Accelerators, incredible investments at Blockchain have led to incredible speed of innovation. This disruption is now ready to penetrate enterprise IT.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Using Facebook Research's new fastText library in supervised mode, I trained a hybrid recommender system, to recommend articles to users, given as training data both the text in the articles and the user/article interaction matrix. The labels attached to a document were both its id, and the ids of all users who viewed it. I've not finished testing it, but early signs are that it learns quite well. This post is a short progress report, perhaps of interest to others building hybrid recommenders. Recently, Facebook Research released the C source code for fastText, a software library for learning word embeddings using a shallow neural network.