Popularly, art connoisseurs are portrayed as sophisticados who carry themselves with an aura of mystery, in command of an inner portal to truth that the rest of us inexplicably just don't possess. Presented with an unassuming Renaissance painting purchased for $1,000 in New Orleans, for instance, one might be stricken with certainty that the painting was authored by no other than Leonardo da Vinci; another attributes hundreds of paintings to Rembrandt and claims that his genius is obvious to the "experienced eye." The elusive certainty of connoisseurship has always come with raised eyebrows: can you tell a garage sale replica from the real deal, let alone a workshop painting from an Old Master one? Can we trust anyone who claims to know? Recent developments in machine learning applied to photographs of artwork promise to lend more objectivity to processes of attribution when the provenance is uncertain.

Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Samson and Delilah is among the most famous works by Peter Paul Rubens, one of the most influential artists of the 17th century. The painting depicts an Old Testament story in which the warrior Samson is betrayed by his lover Delilah. When London's National Gallery bought the masterpiece in 1980, it became the third most expensive artwork ever purchased at auction. But the buyers may now be searching for their receipt.

The National Gallery has always given pride of place to Peter Paul Rubens's Samson and Delilah, listing it among the "highlights" of its collection, since it purchased the picture at Christie's in 1980 for a then record price. It depicts the Old Testament hero in the lap of the lover who betrayed him, having beguiled him into revealing that his God-given strength lay in his uncut hair. As Samson sleeps, Delilah's accomplice cuts his locks, rendering him powerless, with soldiers ready at the door to capture him. Critics have long suggested that the painting is not really by Rubens. And now a series of scientific tests employing groundbreaking AI technology have concluded that the 17th-century Flemish master could never have painted it.

A tiny California start-up is looking to printers to solve the housing crisis – actually, a very large 3D printer. The company, Mighty Buildings, has been showcasing small (350 square foot) studio apartment models of its new "ADU" units (Accessory Dwelling Units) aimed at backyards and selling for around $115,000. That is, if you do the work and deal with local governments to get all the permits, connect the utilities and install the unit. Have Mighty set it up for you, and you're looking around $184,000. Sam Ruben, the co-founder of the firm, says Mighty can have the home in place in just over two weeks.

Computers are becoming more like humans every day. Local experts believe we have passed the infancy stage of artificial intelligence but have not quite gotten to the adolescent stage yet. "Artificial intelligence really covers anything you're trying to get the computer to mimic (in) human behavior," said Bryan Reinicke, associate professor of information systems at Rochester Institute of Technology's Saunders College of Business. "These are all the things that we've learned since birth, but computers don't know any of that. A lot of computers are incredibly fast at mathematics, but they're profoundly stupid."

Feature selection is useful on a variety of fronts: it is the best weapon against the Curse of Dimensionality; it can reduce overall training times; and it is a powerful defense against overfitting, increasing model generalizability. After some experiences, using stacked neural nets, parallel neural nets, asymmetric configs, simple neural nets, multiple layers, dropouts, activation functions etc there is one conclusion: There's NOTHING like a good Feature Selection. Accuracy and generalization power can be leveraged by a correct feature selection, based in correlation, skewness, t-test, ANOVA, entropy and information gain. In a time when ample processing power can tempt us to think that feature selection may not be as relevant as it once was, it's important to remember that this only accounts for one of the numerous benefits of informed feature selection -- decreased training times.

In July 2013, an up-and-coming artist had an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by the public, received press coverage, and featured works produced over a number of years, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a fairly typical art-world event. The only unusual feature was that the artist in question was a computer program known as "The Painting Fool." Even that was not such a novelty.