An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was created by a team of scientists, including Masaharu Nishimura, who came up with the basic concept, and Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in…
Tag: Voices
Microsoft’s AI Generates Voices That Sing in Chinese and English
Researchers at Zhejiang University and Microsoft claim they’ve developed an AI system — DeepSinger — that can generate singing voices in multiple languages by training on data from music websites. From a report: In a paper published on the preprint Arxiv.org, they describe the novel approach, which leverages a specially-designed component to capture the timbre of singers from noisy singing data….
Inside the Plot To Kill the Open Technology Fund
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: [The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, which is part of the umbrella group called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also controls Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.] OTF’s goal is to help oppressed communities across the globe by building the digital tools they need and…
FCC Republican Voices Doubts About Trump’s Executive Order
Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said he’s unsure whether his agency has the authority to carry out President Trump’s executive order targeting tech firms’ legal protections. From a report: Trump’s order seeks to have the FCC craft regulations limiting the scope of legal immunity that online platforms have under federal law. All three commission Republicans would need to support such…
Snapchat To Stop Promoting Trump’s Content
Snapchat said Wednesday it would no longer promote President Donald Trump’s content in its Discover section, a move that brings the messaging company closer to Twitter’s approach in the ongoing debate over political speech. From a report: The company said in a statement that it would not “amplify voices who incite racial violence.” Snapchat’s Discover section typically features content from news…
Instagram Users Flood the App With Millions of Blackout Tuesday Posts
Instagram users are flooding the platform with black squares in support of black victims of police violence as part of a Blackout Tuesday protest. CNBC reports: As of 11:45 a.m. ET, more than 14.6 million Instagram posts used the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday. Searches for “blackout tuesday image” and “blackout image” surged 400% Tuesday morning, according to Google Trends. The idea of an…
A memo Coursera CEO and executives sent to employees earlier today reaffirming Coursera’s actions to address racial injustice through learning
Team, We are all hurt and outraged by the tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and by the bigotry that Christian Cooper experienced in New York City. These racist acts bring to the forefront the fears and injustices that Black Americans have faced every day for generations. As I shared with […]
The post A memo Coursera CEO…
Lawsuit Says Trump’s Social Media Crackdown Violates Free Speech
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: President Trump’s crackdown on social media companies faced a new legal challenge on Tuesday, as a technology policy organization claimed in a lawsuit that he violated the companies’ right to free speech with his executive order aimed at curtailing their legal protections. The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology says…
Doctors Are Tweeting About Coronavirus To Make Facts Go Viral
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has had a front-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Wachter’s job, at least in part, is to keep the department’s 3,000 or so faculty, trainees and staff current on developments in research, education…
Dogs Obey Commands Given by Social Robots
Long time reader schwit1 shares a report: At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2020), researchers at Yale University’s Social Robotics Lab led by Brian Scassellati presented a paper taking the first step towards determining whether dogs, which are incredibly good at understanding social behaviors in humans, see human-ish robots as agents — or more specifically, whether dogs see…