Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) remain a cornerstone of generative computer vision, yet their training is often plagued by artifacts that degrade reconstruction and generation quality. This paper introduces VIVAT, a systematic approach to mitigating common artifacts in KL-VAE training without requiring radical architectural changes. We present a detailed taxonomy of five prevalent artifacts - color shift, grid patterns, blur, corner and droplet artifacts - and analyze their root causes. Through straightforward modifications, including adjustments to loss weights, padding strategies, and the integration of Spatially Conditional Normalization, we demonstrate significant improvements in VAE performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in image reconstruction metrics (PSNR and SSIM) across multiple benchmarks and enhances text-to-image generation quality, as evidenced by superior CLIP scores. By preserving the simplicity of the KL-VAE framework while addressing its practical challenges, VIVAT offers actionable insights for researchers and practitioners aiming to optimize VAE training.

After smartphones, the next big thing arguably is artificial intelligence enabled voice-activated virtual assistants. Although the smartphone will not become obsolete any time soon, interaction with multiple devices would be a reality as a result of virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. Among the big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft that are contributing to making the virtual assistant platforms more tech-savvy, Samsung's newly announced Bixby is a cut above the rest as cutting-edge and state-of-the-art AI technology is its backbone. Bixby 2.0 is integrated with Viv which for the uninitiated is developed by the tech gurus who were the masterminds of Siri. In 2010 Siri was sold to Apple and the developers ultimately quit Apple and formed a new company of their own which is widely known as Viv Labs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has flown beneath the radar for the first six decades of its development, and just recently it's exploded into public consciousness, according to Neil Jacobstein. The AI & Robotics co-chair at Singularity University and former CEO of Teknowledge Corporation believes the combination of humans, AI, and good business processes is disrupting the very ground we stand on in financial technology (Fintech) and beyond as we already use machine learning tools to augment the power of the human brain. At Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference today, Jacobstein pointed to examples like Google's AlphaGo wiping the floor with world champion Lee Sedol, and how quickly the world shifted from a state of shock to seizing the scientific opportunity. Soon after seeing its human champion so thoroughly beaten by a machine, South Korea announced a plan to spend $840 million by 2020 to boost AI research and development (R&D), and to create a research institute where six of the country's highest profile tech companies--Samsung, LG, SK Telecom SKT, KT, Naver, and Hyundai--will each invest up to $3 billion in AI R&D. He also mentioned Facebook's DeepText AI language comprehension and categorization, as well as Viv, saying that calling it another personal assistant misses the point.

Do you remember when Siri first spoke to you? It was impressive and a little bit scary. But mostly it was entertaining. We all figured out Siri's limitations within a few minutes of messing around with her artificial intelligence (AI) functionality. But today, an update: We have AI like Alexa, which can deliver flowers to our spouses at work, or tell us how to say "pork belly" in Portuguese.

Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby is built into its latest smartphones. Smartphones have dominated the last 10 years of computing, but we're on the cusp of the next big platform: voice-activated virtual assistants, powered by artificial intelligence. While the smartphone isn't going away, you'll soon be able to interact with many more devices thanks to assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. All the big technology companies – Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft – are building assistant platforms. But perhaps the most promising is Samsung, which just announced a new AI version of its Bixby assistant.

Back in January, CES introduced headlines on how Artificial Intelligence was taking centre stage as the key technology for the year. We've already seen how AI has emerged on the consumer side of things, with things like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa changing the way we communicate and search. But, what does all this mean for the growth of enterprise? Well, first, only moments after the announcement of the "Echo Show" from Amazon, Cisco revealed that they would be purchasing "MindMeld" a company known for pioneering technology for intelligent conversational solutions. Cisco's Rob Salvagno noted that the acquisition of MindMeld would enhance the business's collaboration suite, with brand new services for Cisco Spark.

Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce has been a hot topic for years, but its benefits have been slow to materialize. Last year, however, that began to change – AI is now becoming useful in the lives of many consumers. Digital assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant have gotten people accustomed to talking to machines, and their impact is just now starting to be understood. Many other applications turn shopping data into actionable insight, and these are now available to smaller merchants. We expect the adoption of these applications will accelerate in 2017.

You've heard of Siri, Viv, Cortana and Echo – you've probably even used one of them. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, these increasingly clever digital assistants provide the user with instant access to information, from the weather forecast to amusing trivia. The most well-known of the bunch is probably Siri, developed by Apple and built in to all iPhones, iPads and Macs as standard. However, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have released their own assistants. Samsung being the most recent tech giant to develop a competing product, revealing its new PA at the beginning of the month.

Last year, the Galaxy Note 7 phablet was hailed as one of the best Android phones out there, but all that positive reception was quickly swiped away by one big problem: the phone's batteries were prone to catching on fire. The fiasco ended up hitting the company with about $5 billion in losses. On Wednesday morning, Samsung launched the Galaxy S8 and S8 phones that it's hoping will save its place as the biggest player in mobile. The phone features all the latest and great internal components you'd expect: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor or Samsung's own Exynos 8895 processor based on the market. There's also a cellular modem that supports Category 16 LTE, which is a type of advanced LTE that theoretically supports download speeds of one gigabit per second depending on the carrier network. But instead of going over every feature, which has pretty much already leaked everywhere by this point, below are the three biggest features I think Samsung is bringing to the mobile market.

What is Samsung's Voice First Bixby system and how is it different? Samsung's Bixby Is A Next Generation Voice First System "Samsung has a conceptually new philosophy to the problem: instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world, it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us."--InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Samsung Samsung has announced Bixby on March 20th, 2017. Bixby is a Voice First system that will be built into Samsung phones and other devices, products and appliances. Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Most existing Voice First systems currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn't work by voice command.