Did you pay for an expensive pay-per-view or streaming pass to watch the hyped-up boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, only to boil with rage as your access went down? Numerous reports have revealed that servers across the US crashed or buckled under demand for the fight, creating outages serious enough that organizers delayed the fight to make sure people could tune in. Mayweather himself said that pay-per-view servers in California and Florida crashed, while Showtime and UFC failed to load, ran into login trouble and otherwise couldn't keep up with interest. The pay-per-view issues at a minimum are known to have affected TV providers like Comcast, Atlantic Broadband and Frontier, although it's not clear how large the scope of the failures was at this stage. Problems like this aren't completely unprecedented -- Mayweather's fight against Manny Pacquiao created hiccups of its own.

Microsoft's speech recognition efforts have hit a significant milestone. It can now transcribe human speech with a 5.1% error rate, Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang wrote in a blog post -- the same error rate as humans. Microsoft actually thought it hit this point last year, when it reached 5.9%, the word error rate it had measured for humans. But then other researchers carried out separate studies and pegged the human error level as slightly lower, 5.1%. But it has now achieved this -- reducing its error rate by 12%, and using AI techniques like "neural-net based acoustic and language models."

The biggest fight of 2017 and possibly the No.1 pay-per-view of all time is finally almost here. Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor will go head-to-head Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, pitting the greatest boxer of his generation against the biggest star in UFC history. It all starts at 9 p.m. EDT on Showtime PPV with three undercard bouts preceding the main event. Watching the fight on TV will cost fans $99.99, making for a potential record-setting night. Preliminary bouts are scheduled to start on FOX at 7 p.m. EDT, and those fights can be seen with a free live stream online with FOX Sports GO.

The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the latent variables such as standard normal distribution, thereby restricting its applications to relatively simple phenomena. In this work, we propose hierarchical nonparametric variational autoencoders, which combines tree-structured Bayesian nonparametric priors with VAEs, to enable infinite flexibility of the latent representation space. Both the neural parameters and Bayesian priors are learned jointly using tailored variational inference. The resulting model induces a hierarchical structure of latent semantic concepts underlying the data corpus, and infers accurate representations of data instances. We apply our model in video representation learning. Our method is able to discover highly interpretable activity hierarchies, and obtain improved clustering accuracy and generalization capacity based on the learned rich representations.

After Kubiiki Pride's 13-year-old daughter disappeared, it took 270 days for her mother to find her. When she did, it was as an escort available to be rented out on an online classified web site. Her daughter had been drugged and beaten into compliance by a sex trafficker. To find her, Pride had to trawl through hundreds of advertisements on Backpage.com, When it comes to identifying signs of human trafficking in online sex adverts, the task for police is often no easier.

Short Video Abstract Prediction of disease onset from patient survey and lifestyle data is quickly becoming an important tool for diagnosing a disease before it progresses. In this study, data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) questionnaire is used to predict the onset of type II diabetes. An ensemble model using the output of five classification algorithms was developed to predict the onset on diabetes based on 16 features. The ensemble model had an AUC of 0.834 indicating high performance.

This work introduces a tensor-based method to perform supervised classification on spatiotemporal data processed in an echo state network. Typically when performing supervised classification tasks on data processed in an echo state network, the entire collection of hidden layer node states from the training dataset is shaped into a matrix, allowing one to use standard linear algebra techniques to train the output layer. However, the collection of hidden layer states is multidimensional in nature, and representing it as a matrix may lead to undesirable numerical conditions or loss of spatial and temporal correlations in the data. This work proposes a tensor-based supervised classification method on echo state network data that preserves and exploits the multidimensional nature of the hidden layer states. The method, which is based on orthogonal Tucker decompositions of tensors, is compared with the standard linear output weight approach in several numerical experiments on both synthetic and natural data. The results show that the tensor-based approach tends to outperform the standard approach in terms of classification accuracy.

Microsoft (probably) knows what you're saying. Microsoft's speech recognition efforts have hit a significant milestone. It can now transcribe human speech with a 5.1% error rate, Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang wrote in a blog post -- the same error rate as humans. Microsoft actually thought it hit this point last year, when it reached 5.9%, the word error rate it had measured for humans. But then other researchers carried out separate studies and pegged the human error level as slightly lower, 5.1%.

Does this phrase conjure up images of rogue robots enslaving humans? If so, you may not be alone in your thinking. AI is a term that's been misused and misunderstood. I'm here to clear that up today. Cinch and many other FinTech startups use a type of AI called machine learning.

The build towards WWE SummerSlam 2017 hasn't been as entertaining as it's been in recent years, but you might not know that by looking at the card. The pay-per-view is almost being treated like WrestleMania, considering it features 12 advertised matches and could last longer than five hours. The kickoff show starts at 6 p.m. EDT, and the actual pay-per-view gets underway an hour later at 7 p.m. EDT at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Fans can either watch the SummerSlam with a live stream on the WWE Network, or they can order the PPV for $54.99. A subscription to the network costs $9.99 per month, though new subscribers get the first month free.