With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, there has been a rapid increase in its application towards creative domains, including music. There exist many systems built that apply machine learning approaches to the problem of computer-assisted music composition (CAC). Calliope is a web application that assists users in performing a variety of multi-track composition tasks in the symbolic domain. The user can upload (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) MIDI files, visualize and edit MIDI tracks, and generate partial (via bar in-filling) or complete multi-track content using the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM). Generation of new MIDI excerpts can be done in batch and can be combined with active playback listening for an enhanced assisted-composition workflow. The user can export generated MIDI materials or directly stream MIDI playback from the system to their favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DA W). We present a demonstration of the system, its features, generative parameters and describe the co-creative workflows that it affords.

So far, when AI companies have trained on YouTube's invaluable stash of videos, captions, and other content, they've done so without permission. An AI-focused content licensing startup called Calliope Networks is hoping to change that with its new "License to Scrape," a program aimed directly at YouTube stars. "There's obvious demand from AI companies to scrape YouTube content. We see that by their actions. So what we're trying to do is to create a tool that makes it legal and simple for them," says Calliope Networks CEO Dave Davis.

Internet service provider Exetel has unveiled a new customer support system that uses artificial intelligence to solve user connection and other support issues online. The Calliope system, developed by Exetel and the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, is the result of an eight-year bid to bake intelligence into the ISP's customer management systems. The new system was developed over the past two years at the institute, and aims to respond to simple questions that would otherwise be fielded by call centre staff. Exetel CEO Steve Waddington told Sri Lankan media last week that by automatically answering common user issues online - often by pointing them to a centralised wiki of support information - the new system freed up support engineers' time and reduced the company's support costs. Waddington drew parallels between the system and the'Siri' feature on Apple iPhones, which translated user requests in natural language - as opposed to set commands - to deliver answers from a variety of sources.

Calliope is an open source mobile robot designed in the Tekkotsu Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with RoPro Design, Inc. The Calliope5SP model features an iRobot Create base, an ASUS netbook, a 5-degree of freedom arm with a gripper with two independently controllable fingers, and a Sony PlayStation Eye camera and Robotis AX-S1 IR rangefinder on a pan/tilt mount. We use chess as a test of Calliope’s abilities. Since Calliope is a mobile platform we consider how problems in vision and localization directly impact the performance of manipulation. Calliope’s arm is too short to reach across the entire chessboard. The robot must therefore navigate to a location that provides the best position to access the pieces it wants to move. The robot proved capable of performing small-scale manipulation tasks that require careful positioning.

Tekkotsu is a free, open source software framework for high-level robot programming. We describe enhancements to Tekkotsu's navigation component, the Pilot, to incorporate a particle filter for localization and an RRT-based path planner for obstacle avoidance. This allows us to largely automate the robot's navigation behavior using a combination of odometry and landmark-based localization. Beginning robot programmers need only indicate a destination in Tekkotsu's world map and the Pilot will take the robot there. The software has been tested both in simulation and on Calliope, a new educational robot developed in the Tekkotsu lab in collaboration with RoPro Design, Inc..