Before a few hours ago, Ahead official has launch that Microsoft's Cortana App for Android leaked out, allowing eager users to get an early look at the virtual assistant application.

I built deepjazz in 36 hours for HackPrinceton, Spring 2016. It uses Keras & Theano, two deep learning libraries, to generate jazz music. Specifically, it builds a two-layer LSTM, learning from the given MIDI file. It uses deep learning, the AI tech that powers Google's AlphaGo and IBM's Watson, to make music -- something that's considered as deeply human.

We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable to those obtained from our empirical dataset.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced a range of workload-optimised compute platforms and solutions to help boost its customers' innovation as they flock to high-performance computing applications. It means organisations using high-performance computing (HPC) solutions are able to use big data workloads to aid their modeling, simulation, high frequency trading and deep learning efforts. At the centre of its new offering, sits HPE's GPU-accelerated deep learning platform - Apollo 6500 - which runs on up to eight high performance NVIDIA GPU cards to offer improved learning systems to organisations that need to quickly model results without dramatically increased costs. It will be especially useful for those working in the financial sector, where scalable, big data applications are in demand to help process high volumes of data generated by real-time trading. The Apollo 4520 system is a dual-node system designed to lower costs for organisations that need to support parallel file system architectures as part of their HPC implementation.

MENLO PARK (Web Desk) – Facebook has begun using artificial intelligence to help people with visual impairments to recognize objects in pictures and then describe photos aloud. Blind Facebook users scrolling through their feed have known for a while exactly what they were missing. Text-to-speech dictation software that describes the back-and-forth comments and recites friends' status updates would offer little when users came across an image: "Photo," the machine would say. Maybe a name, if the photo was tagged with a person. The feature was being tested on mobile devices powered by Apple iOS software and which have screen readers set to English.

The multibillion-dollar business plans being hatched by global automakers and technology companies for self-driving vehicles depend on a sensor that's less than 1 inch wide and costs all of 92 cents. And a company you've probably never heard of, Nippon Ceramic Co., controls about half of that market. Its stock is up more than 40 percent over the past three years and analysts expect profits to nearly double by 2018. In other words, it's good to be Nippon Ceramic right now. The Japanese maker of ultrasonic sensors, which help autonomous vehicles avoid crashes and fit into tight parking spaces, expects demand to double in the next five years and is expanding its production lines to keep up, President Shinichi Taniguchi said in an interview.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang has ridden the game industry to glory in the graphics chip business. But now those chips are being used for more than just games. And Nvidia now has a software development kit for deep-learning A.I. developers. That software kit will enable developers to create better deep-learning applications to solve problems such as enabling self-driving cars to recognize pedestrians. Nvidia is creating its own deep-learning chip and technology for self-driving cars, Huang said in a keynote speech at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California.

The Brand AI can analyse this liquid big data using its machine learning capabilities to create dynamic real-time personalised actionable insights seamlessly across a customer's physical and digital experience – it is the heartbeat of the retailer's invisible omni-channel offering. For example, the Brand AI can advise in-store sales staff in advance what specific products a customer wants or needs that particular day to help personalise this human interaction, provide on the spot guidance and critical feedback about products available immediately to drive a purchasing decision, or tailor in-store digital experiences such as virtual reality or media walls to create genuine moments of customer delight. In addition, the AI can capture the customer's emotional and physical reactions via wearables to these experiences (such as a raised heartbeat when seeing a new product for the first time); such insights can then be explored later by the customer (including socially with family and friends) using the AI on the retailer's integrated digital channel to sustain their retention. A further opportunity for using Brand AI is its potential ability to streamline inventory management to improve the customer experience and reduce operating risk.

Since the first computer-managed elements entered service in a General Motors auto manufacturing plant in 1961, almost every service and manufacturing industry in the world has benefited from increased automation provided -- to a greater or lesser degree -- by robotics. And, as industries become more deeply interconnected as a result of the demands of globalization and ubiquitous connectivity, so the very nature of robots will also evolve. However, increased proliferation of robots will bring as many new or accentuated risks as benefits, heightening the need for control over our creations. Today, there are many different types of robots in commercial and private use, with form factors varying considerably from the static to the fully mobile, from the microscopic to the truly huge and from the single function-specific design to the multi-function, modular types popularised by science fiction. Risks and threats posed by robots will also vary considerably.

Getting old sucks, just ask Kobe Bryant. But that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun at the basketball star's expense. Apple debuted a new ad for its fourth-generation Apple TV Sunday, starring Bryant and Michael B. Jordan, who does just that. In the spot, Jordan -- under the guise of preparing for a role where he will play Bryant in a biopic -- compares the aging Lakers star to Father Time. Of course, he also takes an opportunity to show off Siri's powers on the Apple TV -- with a Benjamin Button reference.