AI & Robotics

Rovio’s Angry Birds, a title that tasks players with slingshotting colorful fowl toward ill-intentioned, egg-stealing swine, has been characterized by one reviewer as “one of the most mainstream games out right now.” It’s spawned dozens of graphic novels and books (including cookbooks), two movies, and four animated series, not to mention countless spinoff games on mobile and other…

Following the success of its Stranger Things and Dark Crystal games, Netflix is adding another title to its gaming catalog: The 3% Challenge, based on hit Brazilian series 3%. The free-to-play episodic game, coming to Amazon Alexa today and Google Assistant later this week, is a prequel to the Netflix series, taking players into a dystopian future where citizens of the impoverished Inland…

A growing body of research suggests that the facial movements of almost anyone can be synced to audio clips of speech, given a sufficiently large corpus. In June, applied scientists at Samsung detailed an end-to-end model capable of animating the eyebrows, mouth, and eyelashes, and cheeks in a person’s headshot. Only a few weeks later, Udacity revealed a system that automatically generates…

Machines have a tougher time summarizing text than you’d think, at least where the summarization is abstractive rather than extractive. While the extraction requires merely concatenating sentences, abstraction involves the task of paraphrasing using novel sentences. Progress has been made in the news domain recently, perhaps owing to the abundance of corpora on which algorithmic systems can be…