During a later visit to a Picasso exhibit in Milan, I came across a famous informational diagram by the art historian Alfred Barr, mapping how modernist movements like Cubism evolved from earlier artistic traditions. Picasso is often held up as one of modern art's most original and influential figures, but Barr's chart made plain the many artists he drew from--Goya, El Greco, Cézanne, African sculptors. This made me wonder: If a generative AI model had been fed all those inputs, might it have produced Cubism? Could it have generated the next great artistic "breakthrough"? These experiences--spread across three cities and centered on three iconic artists--coalesced into a broader reflection I'd already begun.

Stories about AI-generated political content are like stories about people drunkenly setting off fireworks: There's a good chance they'll end in disaster. WIRED is tracking AI usage in political campaigns across the world, and so far examples include pornographic deepfakes and misinformation-spewing chatbots. It's gotten to the point where the US Federal Communications Commission has proposed mandatory disclosures for AI use in television and radio ads. Despite concerns, some US political campaigns are embracing generative AI tools. There's a growing category of AI-generated political content flying under the radar this election cycle, developed by startups including Denver-based BattlegroundAI, which uses generative AI to come up with digital advertising copy at a rapid clip.

Former Attorney General William Barr criticized the media for pushing the "lie" that former President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Former Attorney General Bill Barr warned that China is the "biggest threat" facing the United States, warning that Beijing has a "highly aggressive plan" to take control of "key" technologies of the future. During an interview with Fox News Digital about his new memoir, "One Damn Thing After Another," in which he details long-term national security challenges facing the U.S., Barr warned the Chinese will continue to be "a huge challenge" for the U.S. "China is the biggest threat that the country faces, not only militarily – because they are building a very capable military -- but also technologically," Barr said, noting that the United States has been "the world's technological leader and people are accustomed to that." Barr told Fox News the Biden administration, in its efforts to combat the threat China poses, should "focus on the fact that it has been that leadership that makes us so prosperous and creates all the opportunity for future generations and provides for our security." "The Chinese have a comprehensive, highly aggressive plan to take control of all of the key technologies of the future, such as 5G communications, robotics, artificial intelligence – all of the technologies that are going to be pivotal in the years to come," Barr said.

One of the most influential game console designers is bowing out. According to Kotaku, NES and SNES designer Lance Barr has retired from Nintendo after 38 years and eight months at the company. Although relatively few know his name, he may have played a key role in obtaining mainstream acceptance for Nintendo and reinvigorating the video game industry in the US. Barr joined Nintendo in a part-time role in December 1982, but he made his biggest mark when he was asked to design the outside of the NES to make the Famicom more palatable for American audiences. As requested, he made it look like it belonged next to a stereo system (complete with a VHS-style cartridge loader) compared to the "soft" Japanese model.

Conditional inference provides a rigorous approach to counter bias when data from automated model selections is reused for inference. We develop in this paper a statistically consistent Bayesian framework to assess uncertainties within linear models that are informed by grouped sparsities in covariates. Finding wide applications when genes, proteins, genetic variants, neuroimaging measurements are grouped respectively by their biological pathways, molecular functions, regulatory regions, cognitive roles, these models are selected through a useful class of group-sparse learning algorithms. An adjustment factor to account precisely for the selection of promising groups, deployed with a generalized version of Laplace-type approximations is the centerpiece of our new methods. Accommodating well known group-sparse models such as those selected by the Group LASSO, the overlapping Group LASSO, the sparse Group LASSO etc., we illustrate the efficacy of our methodology in extensive experiments and on data from a human neuroimaging application.

Last year at AWS re:invent, the company's massive customer conference, Amazon launched a new miniature race car and a racing league, all designed to teach developers about machine learning in a fun way. Today, ahead of next week's re:Invent conference, the company announced some enhancements including an improved car and expanded racing schedule. "We are adding more chances to compete at AWS events and at your own events, more chances to win with new races, including head-to-head multi-car competitions, and an upgraded DeepRacer car with new sensing capabilities," AWS's Jeff Barr wrote in the company blog announcing the updates. For starters, there is a new car called DeepRacer Evo that builds on the original model that came out last year. This one includes a new stereo camera and a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor.

Double-dog dare you, SCOTUS: A federal judge obliterated the Trump administration's plans to include a citizenship-based question in the 2020 census, Mark Joseph Stern writes. In addition to deconstructing the various ways the commerce secretary violated established law in trying to make this happen, Judge Jesse Furman also issued a read-between-the-lines challenge to the Supreme Court, which may take up the case. Barr sinister: William Barr showed up to his confirmation hearing Tuesday with the goal of assuaging an anxious nation. The attorney general nominee succeeded, delivering what Andrew Cohen calls a "bravura performance," managing to look serious, somber, and sober. But don't be fooled, Cohen insists: Barr is still unfit to oversee the Mueller investigation. Has he become a radical socialist?

With barely a month to go until Google holds its annual Pixel event, it seems as though one of the most anticipated announcements won't be happening. In an interview at IGA on Friday with Miles Barr, director of engineering for Wear OS, former Macworld reporter Caitlin McGarry of Tom's Hardware learned that Google won't be releasing a watch this year, as had been previously rumored. Well, at least we now know how Google was actually able to keep something secret. We'll likely never know whether the project was canceled, delayed, or simply never existed, but the fact of the matter is that we haven't seen any leaked Pixel Watch shots because there weren't any to take. So now there probably won't be any surprises at the event since we've already seen every square inch of the Pixel phones.

E-commerce giant Amazon's cloud services company, Amazon Web Services, has started shipping its $249 camera DeepLens geared for deep-learning tasks, said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, which in turn is a part of artificial intelligence. DeepLens is a video camera that runs deep-learning models, Barr said. The camera can be used in several verticals such as military, healthcare, hospitality and education. In terms of hardware, the DeepLens comes with a four megapixel camera (1080p video), a 2D microphone array, and draws power from an Intel Atom Processor.

In all the recent Roseanne micro-controversies, one incredible statement by Roseanne Barr seems to have eluded her critics. "I have 20 fortnite victory royale wins," she tweeted back in February. It's not clear how serious the 65-year-old comeback kid was being. Mostly because, as Fortnite Battle Royale players will know, to have 20 Victory Royale wins is incredibly hard. Gamers start off marooned on an island with a hundred other online players.