So long as we can say'This is the worst,' " go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. "There is simply no end of ends," Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we've created to depict the apocalypse--or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof. Station Eleven is often described as "postapocalyptic," but as Lynskey points out, the more accurate term would be "postcatastrophic." That's a better label for stories in which "the world has not ended, but a world has, creating a blank ...

Spurred by the demand for interpretable models, research on eXplainable AI for language technologies has experienced significant growth, with feature attribution methods emerging as a cornerstone of this progress. While prior work in NLP explored such methods for classification tasks and textual applications, explainability intersecting generation and speech is lagging, with existing techniques failing to account for the autoregressive nature of state-of-the-art models and to provide fine-grained, phonetically meaningful explanations. We address this gap by introducing Spectrogram Perturbation for Explainable Speech-to-text Generation (SPES), a feature attribution technique applicable to sequence generation tasks with autoregressive models. SPES provides explanations for each predicted token based on both the input spectrogram and the previously generated tokens. Extensive evaluation on speech recognition and translation demonstrates that SPES generates explanations that are faithful and plausible to humans.

Ozzy Osbourne's son Jack Osbourne spoke with Fox News Digital about what he likes and doesn't like about artificial intelligence. Jack Osbourne has dueling opinions about the use of artificial intelligence. I use it all the time. You know, we use it a ton for graphics and for stuff with the podcasts," he said in an interview with Fox News Digital. The 38-year-old said he uses programs like ChatGPT "as a foundation.

'America's Got Talent' judge Howie Mandel explains why he isn't afraid of artificial intelligence and is ready to use it in his own life. While much of Hollywood is wary of artificial intelligence, Howie Mandel has no such fears. The "America's Got Talent" judge told Fox News Digital, "I am embracing AI. I have AI in my office." He continued, explaining, "I work with a company that is creating a proto, they're called, they're a hologram company that does it. And I love the ability to do more things than I can do and be in more places than I can be with the use of technology."

We may not have had quite as much unfettered reading time as we did in the lockdown days of the COVID pandemic, but Engadget's editors have still managed to pick out, peruse and ponder a broad variety of this year's most intriguing books. Whether we learned how to wield a wok, listened to life lessons from Hideo Kojima, or dove into the seedy underbelly of an alt-universe 1940's San Francisco, here are a few of our favorites from 2022. Classic noir cinema was a staple in my house growing up -- I mean, my first celebrity crush was on The Thin Man series co-star, Myrna Loy -- so any story from the days when mugs were mooks and gals were dames holds sway over my heart. But The Thin Man, like the rest of the media made at that time, only showed a very narrow, very male, very white view of life. Christopher Moore's latest novel, Razzmatazz, adds some much needed color to the otherwise black-and-white world of noir.

Reinforcement Learning is beginning to be applied outside traditional domains such as robotics, and into human-centric domains such as healthcare and education. In these domains, two problems are critical to address: We must be able to evaluate algorithms with a collection of prior data if one is available, and we must devise algorithms that carefully trade off exploration and exploitation in such a way that they are guaranteed to converge to optimal behavior quickly, while retaining very good performance with limited data. In this thesis, I examine these two problems, with an eye towards applications to educational games.

H2O.ai, which is on a mission to "democratize" artificial intelligence for not just enterprises, but for "everyone," announced this morning a $72.5 million Series D. This round nearly doubles the amount the company had raised in previous financings combined over its lifetime. Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund out of China led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Wells Fargo, NVIDIA GPU Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. As part of the financing, Jade Mandel, vice president of Goldman Sachs' principal strategic investments group, will be joining H2O.ai's board. The round brings H2O.ai's total raised since it was founded in 2012 to nearly $147 million. Wells Fargo and NVIDIA GPU Ventures led its $40 million Series C in November 2017.

In 2016, training expenditure in the US exceeded $70.6 billion--yet experts say that 90% of new skills are lost within a year if they aren't reinforced. Doing the rough math, by not reinforcing training, organizations run the risk of wasting up to $63.54 billion a year. If you're in charge of employee development--whether in HR, a Business Unit, or Sales Enablement--employee training is a big investment that can sometimes feel like a high-stakes gamble, especially when it comes to soft skills training. You might wonder, "Am I choosing the right solution? Will they adopt the skills? Will my investment turn results? Can I confidently report a viable ROI?"

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) The rise of robots and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the workplace, but could these advancements send workers to the unemployment line? It's a robot revolution -- prototypes that deliver food, drones that deliver packages and driverless cars that deliver you. "The whole pattern is that information technology is not simply about making things more efficient it's about creating new products and services that customers are willing to pay for," said Michael Mandel, with the Technology CEO Council. Mandel is the author of a new report'The Coming Productivity Boom' that found robots and artificial intelligence could lead to an economic boom. He predicts it will happen in the Midwest.

Good news: The robots may not destroy us after all. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column that outlined the worries of big thinkers such as Stephen Hawking and Andrew Yang who are predicting a wave of job destruction caused by automation, robots and artificial intelligence. Michael Mandel begs to differ. Mandel is chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute. He and Bret Swanson, president of Entropy Economics LLC, just completed a study for the Tech CEO Council that foresees a rather bright economic future brought about by technological innovation. I recently interviewed Mandel and he made a compelling argument that the application of technology to the physical economy will, in time, produce more jobs, higher wages, greater productivity and all kinds of as-yet-unimagined business activity.