Robo Rocker: How Artificial Intelligence Wrote Beatles-Esque Pop Song

At the SONY CSL Research Laboratory, an artificial intelligence (AI) system composed a pop song using software called Flow Machines.

Credit: SONY CSL Research Laboratory

When researchers recently unveiled the first pop song composed by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, some creative types may have been nervous about the idea of robots taking over their jobs. But how exactly was AI used to write a song?

A team from the Sony CSL Research Lab used a system called Flow Machines to compose the new record, titled "Daddy's Car."
The song sounds like a lost Beatles track from the late 1960s, or perhaps a composition by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. François Pachet, the project's lead researcher, told Live Science that the song wasn't created by an AI entirely from scratch, so composers can breathe easy — at least for now.

The song's lyrics, surreal as they sound, were written by a human, French composer Benoît Carré. The team also put together a second track, called "Mr. Shadow," designed to incorporate the styles of Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.
The parts that were written by the computer are known as the "lead sheet," which defines the song's melody, part of the orchestration and part of the mix (which ordinarily audio engineers would then complete). The user, in this case Carré, first chose a style of orchestration. A piece of software called Flow Composer used a database of 13,000 lead sheets to map the style to the lead sheet — that is, take the melody and make it fit the style of music.
"The user has to select the orchestration style from a palette of styles — actually styles here, are human recordings of existing single songs. For instance, a Brazilian guitarist has recorded 'Girl from Ipanema,' [and] we can select this recording, and it is mapped onto the lead sheet," Pachet told Live Science in an email.
The software can then fit the style of the base song — for example, an old Beatles track — to the melody. "If there are chords in the lead sheets that were not played in the audio, the system can still use chord substitutions and audio transformations so that it still 'fits,'" Pachet said. What this means is the artificial intelligence can substitute in music if the specific chords weren't in the song used as a base — the Beatles in this example

Final choices are still left up to the user — for example if the user doesn't like the accompaniments that the AI came up with — but Pachet said in the future, these decisions could be automated as the researchers build a bigger database of which accompaniments "work" better with certain types of melodies. The machines could be taught this, via a kind of reinforcement learning; greater weights would be assigned to the "right" kinds of answers, and eventually an AI could learn what choices sound better to human ears.
Still, there are things that the system does not do well, Pachet said. "The hard part is now high-level 'structure,' or what I call "sense of direction" — i.e., the capacity to establish long-term correlations between elements of the piece (sequence). That is the thing we (and others) are working on currently," he said.
Teaching an AI the "global timbre" of a song is also difficult, Pachet said. A human can say "this song sounds like X," but computers are not good at that kind of holistic thinking, he said.
Lyrics, as it happens, could be written by machine, he added, but the technology isn't yet integrated into Flow Machine.
That said, the individual pieces that will give AI the ability to compose might come together in the future, he added. "Basically, all the basic ingredients are out there, and the trick is to put the pieces together," Pachet said .

'Firework' Drones Swarm the Sky, Setting New World Record

The "fireworks" display was not produced by pyrotechnics, but by hundreds of individual drones each fitted with an LED light.

Credit: Guinness World Records

Fireworks sparkled in the night sky over a football field in Germany recently, but no one heard a single boom. That's because the fireworks show was, in fact, a swarm of 500 LED-lit drones aiming to break a world record.
The pyrotechnics-free display was part of Intel Corporation's fake-fireworks drone program. With a 500-drone fleet, Intel broke its own Guinness World Record for the most unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) airborne simultaneously. The company first set the record in 2015 with 100 drones. This year, Intel engineers programmed 500 drones to perform a fireworks-style routine. [Gallery of Wonders: The Weirdest World Records]
The company specifically designed its "Shooting Star" — a small quadcopter drone outfitted with an LED light — to put on dramatic light shows. Made of foam and plastic, these tiny drones weigh just 0.5 lbs. (280 grams) each. The LED lights are capable of creating more than 4 billion color combinations, according to Intel's fact sheet on the drone. The company also claims that the software and animation interface allows users to create a light show in a matter of days, instead of weeks or months.

For the world-record attempt, Intel programmed the drones to create a fireworks-like show. In the finale, the drones flew in formation to create the number 500 and then the Intel logo.
The Shooting Stars can move together as a drone fleet, operated by one pilot using a laptop.
"These drones are able to fly as a fleet," Daniel Gurdan, Intel's engineering lead, said in a statement. "This is the first time ever we can show it works so well with so many drones!"

Google is now making inroads into Indian universities with its " Android skilling and certification" programme. Launched in the capital on Monday, the programme has set a target of training two million Android developers from India in the next three years. The tech giant has partnered with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) to make its Android app development training programme available in 31 Indian universities — both public and private.

Among the courses and modules under the skilling programme is an Android fundamentals course to be made available at public and private universities, in addition to NSDC institutes. On NPTEL, a project by the Union ministry of human resource development that offers online courses, the Android fundamentals course will go live starting July 18, and will be part of its online mobile computing course.

"We designed the curriculum with India in mind. The demand for certification in India is much stronger than in other areas of the world," Peter Lubbers, head of Google Developer Training, told TOI. "In India, there are some unique demands around building your apps in a high-performance, low-bandwidth environment. We built that into the curriculum and the certification," said Lubbers.

Google Nexus 2016: Everything we know so far

Google already runs developer training programmes globally with Udacity, a non-profit organisation for online courses. These started in 2014. This is in keeping with the industry trend of tech companies offering training programmes and certifications. Microsoft, for example, runs similar certification programmes for coders and technicians.

Android training programmes, says Udacity VP Clarissa Shen, are among the most popular in India. "We get about 27,000 users a month from India alone," Shen told TOI. For the Google Developer Training programmes, Lubbers said they have seen roughly 11,500 people from India sign up every month — that's 400 a day. "Globally, we see about 2,500 enrolments a day,"

Also, part of the larger training programme is an associate Android developer certification. Much like certification programmes in English language proficiency, these certification exams can be taken against a fee of Rs 6,500.

This certification, Google says, is primarily for job-seekers looking for entry-level Android developer jobs.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai's letter to employees

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Search giant Google has an annual tradition of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin penning letter to employees on the company's progress and priorities during the year. The custom dates back to the year 2004 when Page and Brin wrote the famous letter titled "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."

This year Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai got to write the letter. This follows the massive restructuring that Google underwent in August last year in which it separated its core internet business from its other 'moonshot' projects and clubbed them all under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.

The letter starts with a small introduction from Google co-founder Page, where he praises Pichai for his performance as new Google CEO. In his message, Pichai outlines six core areas of focus for Google across product lines.

Below is the letter with Page's introduction (as it appeared on Google blog).

This year's Founders' Letter
April 28, 2016
Every year, Larry and Sergey write a Founders' Letter to our stockholders updating them with some of our recent highlights and sharing our vision for the future. This year, they decided to try something new. - Ed.
In August, I announced Alphabet and our new structure and shared my thoughts on how we were thinking about the future of our business. (It is reprinted here in case you missed it, as it seems to apply just as much today.) I'm really pleased with how Alphabet is going. I am also very pleased with Sundar's performance as our new Google CEO. Since the majority of our big bets are in Google, I wanted to give him most of the bully-pulpit here to reflect on Google's accomplishments and share his vision. In the future, you should expect that Sundar, Sergey and I will use this space to give you a good personal overview of where we are and where we are going.

- Larry Page, CEO, Alphabet

(Pichai's letter begins)
When Larry and Sergey founded Google in 1998, there were about 300 million people online. By and large, they were sitting in a chair, logging on to a desktop machine, typing searches on a big keyboard connected to a big, bulky monitor. Today, that number is around 3 billion people, many of them searching for information on tiny devices they carry with them wherever they go.

In many ways, the founding mission of Google back in '98—"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"—is even truer and more important to tackle today, in a world where people look to their devices to help organize their day, get them from one place to another, and keep in touch. The mobile phone really has become the remote control for our daily lives, and we're communicating, consuming, educating, and entertaining ourselves, on our phones, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

Knowledge for everyone: search and assistance
As we said when we announced Alphabet, "the new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google." Those opportunities live within our mission, and today we are about one thing above all else: making information and knowledge available for everyone.

This of course brings us to Search—the very core of this company. It's easy to take Search for granted after so many years, but it's amazing to think just how far it has come and still has to go. I still remember the days when 10 bare blue links on a desktop page helped you navigate to different parts of the Internet. Contrast that to today, where the majority of our searches come from mobile, and an increasing number of them via voice. These queries get harder and harder with each passing year—people want more local, more context-specific information, and they want it at their fingertips. So we've made it possible for you to search for [Leonardo DiCaprio movies] or [Zika virus] and get a rich panel of facts and visuals. You can also get answers via Google Now—like the weather in your upcoming vacation spot, or when you should leave for the airport—without you even needing to ask the question.

Helping you find information that gets you through your day extends well beyond the classic search query. Think, for example, of the number of photos you and your family have taken throughout your life, all of your memories. Collectively, people will take 1 trillion photos this year with their devices. So we launched Google Photos to make it easier for people to organize their photos and videos, keep them safe, and be able to find them when they want to, on whatever device they are using. Photos launched less than a year ago and already has more than 100 million monthly active users. Or take Google Maps. When you ask us about a location, you don't just want to know how to get from point A to point B. Depending on the context, you may want to know what time is best to avoid the crowds, whether the store you're looking for is open right now, or what the best things to do are in a destination you're visiting for the first time.

But all of this is just a start. There is still much work to be done to make Search and our Google services more helpful to you throughout your day. You should be able to move seamlessly across Google services in a natural way, and get assistance that understands your context, situation, and needs—all while respecting your privacy and protecting your data. The average parent has different needs than the average college student. Similarly, a user wants different help when in the car versus the living room. Smart assistance should understand all of these things and be helpful at the right time, in the right way.

The power of machine learning and artificial intelligence
A key driver behind all of this work has been our long-term investment in machine learning and AI. It's what allows you to use your voice to search for information, to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for "hugs" in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging ... to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It's what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful.

We've been building the best AI team and tools for years, and recent breakthroughs will allow us
to do even more. This past March, DeepMind's AlphaGo took on Lee Sedol, a legendary Go master, becoming the first program to beat a professional at the most complex game mankind ever devised. The implications for this victory are, literally, game changing—and the ultimate winner is humanity. This is another important step toward creating artificial intelligence that can help us in everything from accomplishing our daily tasks and travels, to eventually tackling even bigger challenges like climate change and cancer diagnosis.

More great content, in more places
In the early days of the Internet, people thought of information primarily in terms of web pages. Our focus on our core mission has led us to many efforts over the years to improve discovery, creation, and monetization of content—from indexing images, video, and the news, to building platforms like Google Play and YouTube. And with the migration to mobile, people are watching more videos, playing more games, listening to more music, reading more books, and using more apps than ever before.

That's why we have worked hard to make YouTube and Google Play useful platforms for discovering and delivering great content from creators and developers to our users, when they want it, on whatever screen is in front of them. Google Play reaches more than 1 billion Android users. And YouTube is the number-one destination for video—over 1 billion users per month visit the site—and ranks among the year's most downloaded mobile apps. In fact, the amount of time people spend watching videos on YouTube continues to grow rapidly—and more than half of this watchtime now happens on mobile. As we look to the future, we aim to provide more choice to YouTube fans—more ways for them to engage with creators and each other, and more ways for them to get great content. We've started down this journey with specialized apps like YouTube Kids, as well as through our YouTube Red subscription service, which allows fans to get all of YouTube without ads, a premium YouTube Music experience and exclusive access to new original series and movies from top YouTube creators like PewDiePie and Lilly Singh.

We also continue to invest in the mobile web—which is a vital source of traffic for the vast majority of websites. Over this past year, Google has worked closely with publishers, developers, and others in the ecosystem to help make the mobile web a smoother, faster experience for users. A good example is the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which we launched as an open-source initiative in partnership with news publishers, to help them create mobile-optimized content that loads instantly everywhere. The other example is Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which combine the best of the web and the best of apps—allowing companies to build mobile sites that load quickly, send push notifications, have home screen icons, and much more. And finally, we continue to invest in improving Chrome on mobile—in the four short years since launch, it has just passed 1 billion monthly active users on mobile.
Of course, great content requires investment. Whether you're talking about Google's web search, or a compelling news article you read in The New York Times or The Guardian, or watching a video on YouTube, advertising helps fund content for millions and millions of people. So we work hard to build great ad products that people find useful—and that give revenue back to creators and publishers.

Powerful computing platforms
Just a decade ago, computing was still synonymous with big computers that sat on our desks. Then, over just a few years, the keys to powerful computing—processors and sensors—became so small and cheap that they allowed for the proliferation of supercomputers that fit into our pockets: mobile phones. Android has helped drive this scale: it has more than 1.4 billion 30-day-active devices—and growing.
Today's proliferation of "screens" goes well beyond phones, desktops, and tablets. Already, there are exciting developments as screens extend to your car, like Android Auto, or your wrist, like Android Wear. Virtual reality is also showing incredible promise—Google Cardboard has introduced more than 5 million people to the incredible, immersive and educational possibilities of VR.

Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the "device" to fade away. Over time, the computer itself—whatever its form factor—will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world.

Enterprise
Most of these computing experiences are very likely to be built in the cloud. The cloud is more secure, more cost effective, and it provides the ability to easily take advantage of the latest technology advances, be it more automated operations, machine learning, or more intelligent office productivity tools.
Google started in the cloud and has been investing in infrastructure, data management, analytics, and AI from the very beginning. We now have a broad and growing set of enterprise offerings: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Apps, Chromebooks, Android, image recognition, speech translation, maps, machine learning for customers' proprietary data sets, and more. Our customers like Whirlpool, Land O'Lakes and Spotify are transforming their businesses by using our enterprise productivity suite of Google Apps and Google Cloud Platform services.
As we look to our long-term investments in our productivity tools supported by our machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts, we see huge opportunities to dramatically improve how people work. Your phone should proactively bring up the right documents, schedule and map your meetings, let people know if you are late, suggest responses to messages, handle your payments and expenses, etc.

Building for everyone
Whether it's a developer using Google Cloud Platform to power their new application, or a creator finding new income and viewers via YouTube, we believe in leveling the playing field for everyone. The Internet is one of the world's most powerful equalizers, and we see it as our job to make it available to as many people as possible.

This belief has been a core Google principle from the very start—remember that Google Search was in the hands of millions long before the idea for Google advertising was born. We work on advertising because it's what allows us to make our services free; Google Search works the same for anyone with an Internet connection, whether it is in a modern high-rise or a rural schoolhouse.

Making this possible is a lot more complicated than simply translating a product or launching a local country domain. Poor infrastructure keeps billions of people around the world locked out of all of the possibilities the web may offer them. That's why we make it possible for there to be a $50 Android phone, or a $100 Chromebook. It's why this year we launched Maps with turn-by-turn navigation that works even without an Internet connection, and made it possible for people to get faster-loading, streamlined Google Search if they are on a slower network. We want to make sure that no matter who you are or where you are or how advanced the device you are using ... Google works for you.

In all we do, Google will continue to strive to make sure that remains true—to build technology for everyone. Farmers in Kenya use Google Search to keep up with crop prices and make sure they can make a good living. A classroom in Wisconsin can take a field trip to the Sistine Chapel ... just by holding a pair of Cardboard goggles. People everywhere can use their voices to share new perspectives, and connect with others, by creating and watching videos on YouTube. Information can be shared—knowledge can flow—from anyone, to anywhere. In 17 years, it's remarkable to me the degree to which the company has stayed true to our original vision for what Google should do, and what we should become.

For us, technology is not about the devices or the products we build. Those aren't the end-goals. Technology is a democratizing force, empowering people through information. Google is an information company. It was when it was founded, and it is today. And it's what people do with that information that amazes and inspires me every day.

It’s man with machines, not man vs machines: Satya Nadella at Build 2016

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft on Wednesday kicked off its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco with its first keynote spearheaded by CEO Satya Nadella.

The company showcased its move towards conversational intelligence with cloud services, tools and bots.

"Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps. Intelligence is infused into all of your interactions," said Nadella

Speaking to an audience of nearly 5000 developers, Nadella introduced improvements to Cortana and announced previews of new cloud services and tool kits to create intelligent bots.

"We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences. Ultimately it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines," added Nadella.

The major announcements were the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Cortona Intelligence suite, interactive bots, Microsoft Cognitive Services, improved pen support, Xbox One development kit and HoloLens integration.

The software giant also announced the HoloLens Development Edition for developers and enterprises while highlighting that developers can use the Universal Windows Platform to create new mixed reality with holograms.

"With Windows 10 now running on over 270 million active devices, we're celebrating with our fans by delivering the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. We are dedicated to making Windows the most productive development environment for all developers, with all-new capabilities for the Universal Windows Platform and all-new tools for bringing apps to Windows 10 from any platform," said Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Windows and Devices Group.

Microsoft announced new additions to the Cortana Intelligence Suite- Microsoft Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot Framework.

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of intelligence APIs that allows systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret commands using natural methods of communication.

On the other hand, the bot framework can be used by developers — programming in any language — to build intelligent bots that enable customers to chat using natural language on a wide variety of platforms including text/SMS, Office 365, Skype, Slack, the Web and more.

It also released the Skype Bot Platform. With this platform, developers can build bots that leverage Skype's multiple forms of communication, including text, voice, video and 3D interactive characters.
The Windows 10 Anniversary Update, coming this summer, feature Windows Ink, Cortana, Windows Hello and gaming.

Microsoft also shared all new tools for bringing apps to Windows 10 from any platform. Windows 10 now has support for native Bash with access to the Windows file system and the universe of open source command line tools.

A new desktop app converter for Project Centennial will enable Win32 and .Net developers to bring apps to the Universal Windows Platform. Developers can extend their applications with Universal Windows Platform capabilities and distribute their apps in the Windows Store.

Also, Xamarin will help make it possible for .Net developers to more easily share common app code across Windows, iOS, and Android apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each platform.

Google awards $20,000 to Kolkata boy for ‘TrueEmoji' tech

 

TrueEmoji will change the way we engage with interfaces and people in our social circle on a daily basis, he c... Read More

KOLKATA: City boy Sumesh Dugar has developed a software that can recognize emotions. Dugar, who won the top honour among 10,000 startups at Launchpad by Google, was also awarded credit worth $20,000 by Google to develop 'TrueEmoji' further.

"Humans have allowed emotionless technology to take over their lives, which has made us robotic. My city Kolkata, which is highly emotive, made me feel this deficiency. Moreover, all over social media, there is lament over the loss of human touch in social communication. This is what spurred me on to develop TrueEmoji," said Dugar, who is in his mid-20s.

TrueEmoji will change the way we engage with interfaces and people in our social circle on a daily basis, he claimed, adding that today's technology is advanced enough to allow us to design products that will enrich digital communication with emotions.


The software can be down loaded on smartphones as an app which aims to eliminate the divide between emotion and communication by moving from artificial intelligence (AI) to emotional intelligence (EI). "Once the TrueEmoji software on your phone is activated, it can read a man's emotional state by analyzing the facial contour through camera," Dugar explained.
This can revolutionize communication altogether. If an app or computer can recognize the state of mind, the communication will be smarter and more effective. "If a person you are communicating with is angry, you will try to be less offensive. If the person is happy, you will continue talking and perhaps even turn your efforts up a notch. If the person is confused, you may go on explaining things better," he said.

Will Watson be Your Jarvis One Day? IBM Takes on Siri

 

Smartphones will soon get a taste of the Watson 2.0 supercomputer technology by IBM. We can thank recent developments in battery power and computing efficiency for that.

Watson has been testing in the medical field, in particular to find a diagnosis and treatment of cancer. And unlike Apple Siri, which is available to all, IBM has decided to be a bit more exclusive with their software, only making it available to higher-end clients in the corporate world. IBM is hoping that the system will be able to answer any questions about finances, telecomm

unications and health care, just to name a few.

One of the problems the Watson seems to have is trying to downsize its processing while trying to increase software efficiency at the same time. The system currently needs 10 IMB Power750 server racks. If that number doesn’t mean anything to you, picture around 6,000 desktops and numerous smartphones operating all at once. The software needs this much power in order to generate answers to any and every single question possible. Although the product is geared towards a higher-end client, there is no way anyone would pay the big bucks and use all that power just for one program.

Another hurdle Watson will have to jump over is the amount of time it requires to create a “learning curve” on the subject it is currently focusing on. IBM has a lot of work on its hands, but the company seems to have a plan in store. The company will combine different technologies it created, like natural language processing and image recognition. In other words, don’t expect to see this product on the market tomorrow. IBM said Watson will not be ready for another several years.