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This is just a fun experiment, please listen to some real Beatles songs on the streaming service of your choice, or even better - buy one of their albums.Mus...

Music

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Computers aren’t going to replace creative pros — but machine learning and artificial intelligence can be powerful tools in the storytelling process. That’s the takeaway from Lexus’ newest ad, which it’s billing as the advertising industry’s first commercial scripted by artificial intelligence. The 60-second spot was directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, working from a script that was developed by IBM’s Watson AI system. (Watch the ad below.) To produce the spot for the Lexus ES executive sedan launching in Europe, the automaker enlisted its creative agency, The&Partnership London, along with technical partner Visual Voice. The agencies collaborated with the IBM Watson team to use AI to analyze 15 years’ worth of footage, text and audio for car and luxury brand campaigns that have won Cannes Lions awards for creativity, as well as a range of other external data.

Digital Media

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The shortage of qualified data scientists is often highlighted as one of the major handbrakes on the adoption of big data and AI. But a growing number of tools are putting these capabilities in the hands of non-experts, for better and for worse. There’s been an explosion in the breadth and quality of self-service analytics platforms in recent years, which let non-technical employees tap the huge amounts of data businesses are sitting on. They typically let users carry out simple, day-to-day analytic tasks—like creating reports or building data visualizations—rather than having to rely on the company’s data specialists. Gartner recently predicted that workers using self-service analytics will output more analysis than professional data scientists. Given the perennial shortage of data specialists and the huge salaries they command these days, that’s probably music to the ears of most C-suite executives. And increasingly, it’s not just simple analytic tasks that are being made more accessible. Driven in particular by large cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, there are a growing number of tools to help beginners start to build their own machine learning models. These tools provide pre-built algorithms and intuitive interfaces that make it easy for someone with little experience to get started. They are aimed at developers rather than the everyday business users who use simpler self-service analytics platforms, but they mean it’s no longer necessary to have a PhD in advanced statistics to get started. Most recently, Google released a service called Cloud AutoML that actually uses machine learning itself to automate the complex process of building and tweaking a deep neural network for image recognition. They aren’t the only ones automating machine learning. Boston-based DataRobot lets users upload their data, highlight their target variables, and the system then automatically builds hundreds of models based on the platform’s collection of hundreds of open-source machine learning algorithms. The user can then choose from the best performing models and use it to analyze future data. For the more adventurous developers, there are a growing number of open-source machine learning libraries that provide the basic sub-components needed to craft custom algorithms. This still requires considerable coding experience and a brain wired for data, but just last month Austin-based CognitiveScale released Cortex, which they say is the first graphical user interface for building AI models. Rather than having to specify what they want by writing and combining endless lines of code, users can simply drop various pre-made AI “skills” like sentiment analysis or natural language processing into a honeycomb-like interface with lines between the cells denoting data flows. These skills can be combined to build a more complex model that is able to carry out high-level tasks, like processing insurance claims using text analysis. Just as replacing esoteric command-line interfaces with visual GUIs like Windows greatly expanded the number of people who were able to engage with personal computers, the creators of Cortex say their tool could have a similar effect for AI. All of these attempts to democratize access to advanced analytics could go a long way to speeding up its adoption across all kinds of businesses. Putting these tools in the hands of non-experts could mean companies that don’t have the resources to compete for the top data professionals can still reap the benefits of AI. It also frees up experts to work on the most cutting-edge applications of the technology rather than getting bogged down on more mundane but commercially important projects. But there are also risks that need to be considered before setting non-experts loose on an organization’s data sets. Data science isn’t just about knowing how to build an algorithm. It’s about understanding how to collect data effectively, how to prepare it for analysis, and the strengths and limitations of various statistical techniques. The old adage “garbage in, garbage out” highlights the danger of putting powerful analytics in the hands of those who don’t fully understand the tools they are using or the provenance of their data and the potential errors or biases that may be hidden in it. Writing in Forbes, Brent Dykes from self-service analytics platform Domo points out that businesses should not expect the democratization of these technologies to magically turn their employees into effective “citizen data scientists.” He says they need to be coupled with solid training on how to interpret and analyze data properly, as well as robust data governance to make sure the data being used is reliable. That will require trained data scientists to play a critical oversight role to ensure that the proliferation of AI provides businesses with reliable insights rather than leading them astray.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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Google's CEO Sundar Pichai expressed an optimistic view about the future of artificial intelligence, but acknowledged that developers must constantly be aware of the societal risks.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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http://www.alphagomovie.com/ Watch on Google Play Movies → https://goo.gl/cyhDYu AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Cambridge, through the backst...

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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Workers of the world, unite---around your consoles.

Digital Media

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Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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2016 was a year of headlines in artificial intelligence. A top-selling holiday gift was the AI-powered Amazon Echo; IBM Watson was used to diagnose cancer; and Google DeepMind’s system AlphaGo cracked the ancient and complex Chinese game Go sooner than expected. And progress continues in 2017. Neil Jacobstein, faculty chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Singularity …

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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“We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” – Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Unlike the director leads you to believe, the protagonist of Ex Machina, Andrew Garland’s 2015 masterpiece, isn’t Caleb, a young programmer tasked with evaluating machine consciousness. Rather, it’s his target Ava, a breathtaking humanoid AI with a seemingly child-like naïveté and an enigmatic mind. Like most cerebral movies, Ex Machina leaves the conclusion up to the viewer: was Ava actually conscious? In doing so, it also cleverly avoids a thorny question that has challenged most AI-centric movies to date: what is consciousness, and can machines have it? Hollywood producers aren’t the only people stumped. As machine intelligence barrels forward at breakneck speed—not only exceeding human performance on games such as DOTA and Go, but doing so without the need for human expertise—the question has once more entered the scientific mainstream. Are machines on the verge of consciousness?

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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“We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.” –Neil DeGrasse Tyson What does it really mean to be connected? Let’s look at some similar terminology: linked, associated, relate

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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The imagination age is a theoretical period beyond the information age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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The engineer at the heart of the Uber/Waymo lawsuit is serious about his AI religion. Welcome to Anthony Levandowski's Way of the Future.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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2017 has been the year of AI, reaching a fever pitch of VC and corporate investment. But, as with any hot technology, AI is outgrowing this phase of..

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985—because the former was a more advanced world—so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30. So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right? Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000—in other words, by 2000, the rate of progress was five times faster than the average rate of progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th century’s worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century’s worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th century’s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.2 If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015—i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decades—and the world in 2050 might be so vastly different than today’s world that we would barely recognize it.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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A short film on the intelligence explosion. If God created his universe in 7 days; what could AI do to ours? The arrival of artificial intelligence promises ...

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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In the 21st season premiere of South Park, Neo-Luddism is targeted with a humorous barrage of criticism, bringing light to the insanity of opposing technological progress.

TechWorld

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Accenture CEO Julie Sweet Talks about how to reskill your workforce for digitial, cloud and security

Digital Media

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With the upcoming Dmexco and Ad Week New York trade shows on the horizon, the words 'Artificial Intelligence', or 'AI', are likely to be ringing in the ears of attendees. The Drum probes experts on how to tell who actually knows what they're talking about, and who is just using another buzzword.

Digital Media

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Marketing AI will transform content marketing forever. Learn how self learning algorithms are automating mundane tasks and providing unprecedented insights.

Digital Media

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Artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt the workplace. What will the company of the future look like--and how will people keep up?

Digital Media

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As more video providers finding audiences directly through apps and the web -- and away from pay-TV-based packages -- we're seeing the emergence of more..

Digital Media

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Contributor Rob Begg discusses the explosion of visual content and how artificial intelligence and image recognition are making it easier for marketers to identify visuals in social media for better metrics and customer service.

Digital Media

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By Tom Vander Ark - Here are 4 primary reasons teachers, parents and students should pay attention to artificial intelligence for the future.

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.

TechWorld

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What should we do when robots take most jobs? (It will happen sooner than think.) Robert Reich explains why a universal basic income may be the answer. Learn...

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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How AI can help: Even today, big data and predictive analytics can not only reduce unbalanced frequency, but also deliver ads when people are most likely to want to see them. TV-aware campaigns can combine viewing data for linear TV with digital viewing data and then analyze it via AI tools for optimum predictive ad delivery. Notes SAS global director Raj Wilson, “AI can predictively optimize audience segmentation while buying media space.”

Digital Media

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Google’s pretty good when it comes to designing artificial intelligence. Its most famous neural network, DeepMind, is both able to “dream” and understand t

Singularity, AI & Consciousness

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There's no need to fear how artificial intelligence, programmatic and other technologies are disrupting the media landscape. Instead, we should welcome challenges to the status quo and old habits, Sue Unerman explains.

Digital Media