FORGING VOICES AND FACES: THE DANGERS OF AUDIO AND VIDEO FABRICATION
Technology companies including Google, Baidu, and Adobe have recently funded efforts to fabricate audio or video from samples of speech or fragments of footage. Startups including Voicery and Lyrebird have developed customizable human voices (built from audio recorded by professional voice actors) that can be programmed to say anything. These companies have also released do-it-yourself software that lets you synthesize your own voice (or someone else’s, with their permission) from a 1-minute recording.
Read moreNASA MARS MISSION FACES SETBACK AFTER HEAT SHIELD CRACKS UNDER PRESSURE
NASA Mars Mission Faces Setback After Heat Shield Cracks Under Pressure : The Two-Way The heat shield, made of material that is as light as balsa wood but can withstand temperatures of nearly 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, broke during testing earlier this month. Source: npr.org
ALGORITHMS TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS
As a developer, you have the power to change the world! You can write programs that enable new technologies. You might work in software to find an earlier diagnosis of diseases. Also, you can write programs to free up people’s time to do other amazing things. Whatever you do it has the potential to impact people around you. However, these accomplishments are only possible if we write software that is fast and can scale.
Read morePENTAGON-FUNDED RESEARCH AIMS TO PREDICT WHEN CRIMES ARE GANG-RELATED
The paper attempts to predict whether crimes are gang-related using a neural network, a complex computational system modeled after a human brain that “learns” to classify or identify items based on ingesting a training dataset. The authors selected what they determined to be the four most important features (number of suspects, primary weapon used, the type of premises where the crime took place, and the narrative description of the crime) for identifying a gang-related crime from 2014–16 LAPD data and cross-referenced the crime incidents with a 2009 LAPD map of gang territory to create a training dataset for their neural network.
Read moreANOTHER SIDE OF FEYNMAN
Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.
Read moreTDM: FROM MODEL-FREE TO MODEL-BASED DEEP REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
While simple, this thought experiment highlights some important aspects of human intelligence. For some tasks, we use a trial-and-error approach, and for others we use a planning approach. A similar phenomena seems to have emerged in reinforcement learning (RL). In the parlance of RL, empirical results show that some tasks are better suited for model-free (trial-and-error) approaches, and others are better suited for model-based (planning) approaches.
Read moreSWIFT FOR TENSORFLOW DESIGN OVERVIEW
Swift for TensorFlow provides a new programming model for TensorFlow – one that combines the performance of graphs with the flexibility and expressivity of Eager execution, while keeping a strong focus on improved usability at every level of the stack. In order to achieve our goals, we scope in the possibility of making (carefully considered) compiler and language enhancements, which enables us to provide a great user experience.
Read moreWATCH THESE STUNNING MODELS OF THE LARGEST STAR MAP EVER CREATED
Since its launch in December 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory has been building the largest and most detailed 3D star catalog in history. Located some 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Earth, the telescope constantly scans our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the wider universe beyond, to log information about the billions of stars and other objects that inhabit these cosmic frontiers.
Read moreINTRODUCTION TO DECISION TREE LEARNING
From Kaggle to classrooms, one of the first lessons in machine learning involves decision trees. The reason for the focus on decision trees is that they aren’t very mathematics heavy compared to other ML approaches, and at the same time, they provide reasonable accuracy on classification problems. Source: fritz.ai
NEW A.I. APPLICATION CAN WRITE ITS OWN CODE
Designing applications that can program computers is a long-sought grail of the branch of computer science called artificial intelligence (AI). The new application, called Bayou, came out of an initiative aimed at extracting knowledge from online source code repositories like GitHub. Users can try it out at askbayou.com. Source: futurity.org