29 November 2017

Google’s New Files Go App: Everything You Need to Know


files-go-app

About a week ago, Google released Files Go, a file manager app that aims to free up space on your Android device. The app’s primary focus is to help make storage management easier, but it also comes with other handy features such as sharing files to nearby devices, not unlike Apple’s AirDrop. Today, we’re taking a look at some of the coolest features of Files Go. Files Go: Who Is It For? Before we discuss Files Go’s features in detail, it’s worth noting that it is likely a part of the Android Go initiative. For the uninitiated, Android Go is...

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You Can Now Try Destiny 2 for Free


Bungie has released a free trial version of Destiny 2. The idea is to hook people who haven’t yet played the game in, as they’re then more likely to buy the full version. Unfortunately for Bungie the Destiny 2 community is revolting right now, so new players are rapidly becoming a necessity. The original Destiny game launched to middling reviews, but gradually became a solid shooter with a loyal community. Earlier this year Destiny 2 arrived on the scene, and was immediately hailed an improvement over its predecessor. And now you can play (some of) Destiny 2 completely for free....

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8 Ways to Give the Gift of Audiobooks This Year


audiobooks-gifts

Audiobooks make fantastic gifts. They can transport your friends and loved ones to a faraway place, teach them something new, or make a long commute less boring. This makes audiobooks a fitting gift for any book lover. Figuring out how to give an audiobook as a gift, however, isn’t always so obvious. And some companies don’t make it easy at all. Thankfully, we’re here to help. And just in time for the holidays too. Let’s take a look at how to give an audiobooks as a gift to someone you love using some of the most popular audiobook services around....

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Amazon Has Some Incredible Deals Today


Right now, Amazon has Destiny 2 for more than 50% off, deals on popular anime shows and movies, savings on H&R Block tax software, and much more! Destiny 2 Destiny 2 - PlayStation 4 Standard Edition Destiny 2 - PlayStation 4 Standard Edition From the makers of the acclaimed hit game Destiny, comes the much-anticipated sequel Buy Now At Amazon $25.95 Amazon is blowing out physical copies of Destiny 2 on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 for even less than Black Friday and Cyber Monday right now. With the first expansion right around the corner, it is the perfect time...

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Stationhead allows anyone to become a streaming radio DJ, with live listener calls


 Streaming services like Spotify have turned playlists into one of the main ways to discover new music, but I’d argue that they’re missing some of the personality of traditional radio — the kind of radio where I knew not just the names of my favorite DJs, but also what kind of music they liked and random details about their life. That’s the experience that Stationhead,… Read More
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Stationhead allows anyone to become a streaming radio DJ, with live listener calls


 Streaming services like Spotify have turned playlists into one of the main ways to discover new music, but I’d argue that they’re missing some of the personality of traditional radio — the kind of radio where I knew not just the names of my favorite DJs, but also what kind of music they liked and random details about their life. That’s the experience that Stationhead,… Read More

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How to Use Apple Pay Cash to Request and Send Money With an iPhone


apple-pay-cash

One of the most significant new features of iOS 11 is now available to iPhone users. Apple Pay Cash has launched alongside the iOS 11.2 update. First introduced by Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2017, the new feature allows you to send and request cash from the native Messages app or by asking Siri. Today we’ll look at Apple Pay Cash in greater detail and learn how to set it up. We’ll also cover some alternatives and how they compare to Apple’s new service. What Is Apple Pay Cash? Apple Pay is mobile payment and digital...

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VLC to Chromecast Is Here! How to Stream Videos From PC


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Many media players support streaming to a Google Chromecast (making it ideal for use as a stripped down media center). However, some still don’t. One of the main culprits is the popular VLC Media Player, a versatile tool in many other areas. So, why doesn’t VLC support Chromecast streaming? Well, it turns out that this is a feature under constant development. And while it isn’t available on stable releases, Chromecast streaming actually is included in development versions. Unfortunately, it still isn’t 100 percent stable, which is why this feature isn’t included in the main VLC Media Player. In this article...

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Snapchat starts algorithm-personalized redesign splitting social and media


 By putting best friends first and dividing them from professional publishers, Snapchat hopes to conquer Instagram and revive its own growth with a big redesign that begins rolling out Friday. And it looks great. Snapchat is finally personalizing, highlighting the most relevant content so it’s easier to consume. “We are separating the social from the media, and taking an important… Read More
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Snapchat starts algorithm-personalized redesign splitting social and media


 By putting best friends first and dividing them from professional publishers, Snapchat hopes to conquer Instagram and revive its own growth with a big redesign that begins rolling out Friday. And it looks great. Snapchat is finally personalizing, highlighting the most relevant content so it’s easier to consume. “We are separating the social from the media, and taking an important… Read More

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This Goal Setting Trick Will Help You Stop Procrastinating


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Procrastination can be a tough nut to crack, particularly because it can have many different roots. For example, procrastination could stem from a physical cause, including clinical depression, seasonal affective disorder, or a technology-induced mental fog. Other times, it’s due to an inefficiency in your productivity setup. For example, these bad workplace habits can drain energy and cause you to lose focus, motivation, etc. Same goes for bad workstation setups like a too-low chair or too-bright screen, which can also drain energy. But if it’s none of those things, then your procrastination might just come down to poor goal management....

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7 Windows 10 Wi-Fi Features You Might Have Missed


windows10-wifi-features

If you’ve simply been connecting to your Wi-Fi network and forgetting about it, you’ve been doing it wrong. You can do so much with your Wi-Fi on Windows 10. We’ve rounded up the best tips and tricks for you. Whether it’s keeping your Wi-Fi disabled for a set period of time, monitoring your data usage, or blocking particular networks from appearing, we’re sure that something below will be useful for you. If you have your own Windows 10 Wi-Fi tip to share, please let us know in the comments. 1. Turn Wi-Fi Back on After a Set Time You might...

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The Internet Music Guide for the Audiophile


Are you an audiophile? If so, you can find hundreds of websites that provide audiophiles with ways to listen to, discover, and buy music. But with so many out there, what are the essential sites you should bookmark? As is our wont here at MakeUseOf, we have uncovered the biggest sites for music fans in several categories. Whether you want to buy an album, stream endless songs, discover new music, or just learn more about it, these pages have what you’re looking for… Streaming Music We start with the best services for streaming music, since buying music is so old-school,...

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How to Request Multiple Destinations in Lyft


Lyft is great for getting you from point A to point B. But a simple feature in the app also lets you get from point B to point C. With this feature, Lyft makes it easy to add multiple destinations in one trip. When ordering a Lyft, you can actually let your ride know ahead of time that you’re going to need to go to two locations. This makes it handy if you need to pick up a friend on the way out or if you want to share a ride with a friend on your way home. How to Request...

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How Much Is Netflix per Month?


The average American household now pays more than $103 per month for cable TV. Considering it’s riddled with ads, packed with channels you’ll never watch, and offers a thoroughly unsatisfactory customer experience, it’s little wonder more people than ever are deciding to cut the cord. If you’ve made the leap, one of the first services you should sign up for is Netflix. Of course, even if you’ve kept cable so you can watch live sports and international 24/7 news channels, Netflix is still worthwhile for its supply of original programming, TV classics, and great movies. But how much is Netflix? What...

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How to Turn Off All the Touch Sounds in Android


Out of the box, your phone probably makes annoying sounds for everything you do. These might drive you crazy simply because you get sick of the noise, or maybe because it disturbs those around you. Thankfully, you can disable the dumb sounds your phone makes so it only makes noise when needed. How to Disable Touch Sounds in Android On Android, open Settings and scroll down to Sound. You’ll see several volume options; select Advanced to see the rest. Then, scroll down to view the Other sounds and vibrations options. We recommend leaving Charging sounds on since that helps you confirm...

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How to Save Time in Gmail With an Attachment Manager


Use the right Gmail search filters and organize your inbox with a few colored labels. That’s the usual Gmail way of handling attachments. But what if I told you there’s a better way? And like most things on Chrome, the solution is in the form of a Gmail extension. Dittach should be the latest addition to your email toolkit. If your inbox is a busy runway for receiving and sending attachments, then this free file manager can give you more control over the big files that piggyback on an email. The Chrome extension is free to download. It’s in beta right now but works automatically with...

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Samsung buys another AI company as it continues to build out Bixby


 It’s true that Bixby didn’t have the most auspicious of debuts when it rolled out on the Galaxy S8 earlier this year, but Samsung’s clearly got big plans for its smart assistant. Late last year, the company picked up Viv, the new assistant from the folks behind Siri — an acquisition that occurred too late to have a major impact on Bixby ahead of release. The consumer… Read More

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Google Finance Gets a Flash-Free Makeover


Alphabet (yes, we know it’s confusing) is giving Google Finance a makeover. And it’s about time too. Google Finance has been stagnating of late, and some elements even relied on Adobe Flash to work despite Google making its feelings about Flash clear on several different occasions. Google seems to be on a mission to update all of its services. Google News and Google Calendar have both been given makeovers in recent months, and now it’s the turn of Google Finance. The latter’s makeover is more than just visual though, finally removing Flash from the equation. Google Finance Gets a Makeover...

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Instagram now allows optional photo and video message replays


 Instagram has tweaked a couple of its direct messaging features to make them a bit more flexible and interactive. You can now automatically capture and remix photos sent to you in replies back to friends, and allow photo and video replays to be replayed more than once. The remix feature lets you capture the original photo message and incorporate it into your reply, complete with the option… Read More
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Interpreting Deep Neural Networks with SVCCA




Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have driven unprecedented advances in areas such as vision, language understanding and speech recognition. But these successes also bring new challenges. In particular, contrary to many previous machine learning methods, DNNs can be susceptible to adversarial examples in classification, catastrophic forgetting of tasks in reinforcement learning, and mode collapse in generative modelling. In order to build better and more robust DNN-based systems, it is critically important to be able to interpret these models. In particular, we would like a notion of representational similarity for DNNs: can we effectively determine when the representations learned by two neural networks are same?

In our paper, “SVCCA: Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis for Deep Learning Dynamics and Interpretability,” we introduce a simple and scalable method to address these points. Two specific applications of this that we look at are comparing the representations learned by different networks, and interpreting representations learned by hidden layers in DNNs. Furthermore, we are open sourcing the code so that the research community can experiment with this method.

Key to our setup is the interpretation of each neuron in a DNN as an activation vector. As shown in the figure below, the activation vector of a neuron is the scalar output it produces on the input data. For example, for 50 input images, a neuron in a DNN will output 50 scalar values, encoding how much it responds to each input. These 50 scalar values then make up an activation vector for the neuron. (Of course, in practice, we take many more than 50 inputs.)
Here a DNN is given three inputs, x1, x2, x3. Looking at a neuron inside the DNN (bolded in red, right pane), this neuron produces a scalar output zi corresponding to each input xi. These values form the activation vector of the neuron.
With this basic observation and a little more formulation, we introduce Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis (SVCCA), a technique for taking in two sets of neurons and outputting aligned feature maps learned by both of them. Critically, this technique accounts for superficial differences such as permutations in neuron orderings (crucial for comparing different networks), and can detect similarities where other, more straightforward comparisons fail.

As an example, consider training two convolutional neural nets (net1 and net2, below) on CIFAR-10, a medium scale image classification task. To visualize the results of our method, we compare activation vectors of neurons with the aligned features output by SVCCA. Recall that the activation vector of a neuron is the raw scalar outputs on input images. The x-axis of the plot consists of images sorted by class (gray dotted lines showing class boundaries), and the y axis the output value of the neuron.
On the left pane, we show the two highest activation (largest euclidean norm) neurons in net1 and net2. Examining highest activations neurons has been a popular method to interpret DNNs in computer vision, but in this case, the highest activation neurons in net1 and net2 have no clear correspondence, despite both being trained on the same task. However, after applying SVCCA, (right pane), we see that the latent representations learned by both networks do indeed share some very similar features. Note that the top two rows representing aligned feature maps are close to identical, as are the second highest aligned feature maps (bottom two rows). Furthermore, these aligned mappings in the right pane also show a clear correspondence with the class boundaries, e.g. we see the top pair give negative outputs for Class 8, with the bottom pair giving a positive output for Class 2 and Class 7.

While you can apply SVCCA across networks, one can also do this for the same network, across time, enabling the study of how different layers in a network converge to their final representations. Below, we show panes that compare the representation of layers in net1 during training (y-axes) with the layers at the end of training (x-axes). For example, in the top left pane (titled “0% trained”), the x-axis shows layers of increasing depth of net1 at 100% trained, and the y axis shows layers of increasing depth at 0% trained. Each (i,j) square then tells us how similar the representation of layer i at 100% trained is to layer j at 0% trained. The input layer is at the bottom left, and is (as expected) identical at 0% to 100%. We make this comparison at several points through training, at 0%, 35%, 75% and 100%, for convolutional (top row) and residual (bottom row) nets on CIFAR-10.
Plots showing learning dynamics of convolutional and residual networks on CIFAR-10. Note the additional structure also visible: the 2x2 blocks in the top row are due to batch norm layers, and the checkered pattern in the bottom row due to residual connections.
We find evidence of bottom-up convergence, with layers closer to the input converging first, and layers higher up taking longer to converge. This suggests a faster training method, Freeze Training — see our paper for details. Furthermore, this visualization also helps highlight properties of the network. In the top row, there are a couple of 2x2 blocks. These correspond to batch normalization layers, which are representationally identical to their previous layers. On the bottom row, towards the end of training, we can see a checkerboard like pattern appear, which is due to the residual connections of the network having greater similarity to previous layers.

So far, we’ve concentrated on applying SVCCA to CIFAR-10. But applying preprocessing techniques with the Discrete Fourier transform, we can scale this method to Imagenet sized models. We applied this technique to the Imagenet Resnet, comparing the similarity of latent representations to representations corresponding to different classes:
SVCCA similarity of latent representations with different classes. We take different layers in Imagenet Resnet, with 0 indicating input and 74 indicating output, and compare representational similarity of the hidden layer and the output class. Interestingly, different classes are learned at different speeds: the firetruck class is learned faster than the different dog breeds. Furthermore, the two pairs of dog breeds (a husky-like pair and a terrier-like pair) are learned at the same rate, reflecting the visual similarity between them.
Our paper gives further details on the results we’ve explored so far, and also touches on different applications, e.g. compressing DNNs by projecting onto the SVCCA outputs, and Freeze Training, a computationally cheaper method for training deep networks. There are many followups we’re excited about exploring with SVCCA — moving on to different kinds of architectures, comparing across datasets, and better visualizing the aligned directions are just a few ideas we’re eager to try out. We look forward to presenting these results next week at NIPS 2017 in Long Beach, and we hope the code will also encourage many people to apply SVCCA to their network representations to interpret and understand what their network is learning.


Fox announces an ‘X-Files’ mobile game coming in 2018


X-Files Deep State Not content to just revive The X-Files on television, Fox is also bringing the franchise to phones and tablets. The new title from FoxNext Games and Creative Mobile Games is planned for release early next year, after the TV show returns for its eleventh (!) season. According to Variety, the story will take place in 2010 — long after the original series, but before the events of last… Read More

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Facebook Is Now Using AI to Help Prevent Suicides


Facebook is ramping up its efforts to help people having suicidal thoughts. And the social network is using artificial intelligence to identify people at risk. While this does carry some privacy implications, it could help save countless lives every year. Which has to be a good thing. Depression and other forms of mental illness can be debilitating. And not everyone has the kind of support network needed to get through trying times. However, even if someone doesn’t feel able to reach out to a friend in person, they may still emit a cry for help on Facebook. Which is why...

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Your Amazon Order Never Arrived? Do This


amazon-not-delivered

Amazon is one of the largest retailers in the world. To put it into context, the company’s market capitalization is larger than Sears, JC Penney, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart combined. However, despite its size — and admittedly impressive passion for pushing the boundaries of retail — it still occasionally gets things wrong. The company is still afflicted by all the same issues that its competitors face; damaged goods, incorrect items being sent out, and occasionally, orders never arriving. If you bought something on Amazon but the item never arrived at your front door, what can you...

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WHEW, Google fixed the burger emoji in Android 8.1


 Apparently, Google made good on its promise to fix its awful hamburger emoji, in the wake of an online debacle last month. In case you missed it, when a tweet about the problem with the emoji went viral – the cheese in Google’s burger emoji is under the bun! The horror! – Google CEO Sundar Pichai replied he would “drop everything” to address this issue. According… Read More
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Analyst says Apple could have sold 6 million iPhone X units during Black Friday weekend


 Apple hasn’t shared any exact number, but Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang calculated that Apple may have sold as many as 6 million iPhone X units this weekend alone, StreetInsider reported. With such a big number, it’s hard to grasp Apple’s success with the iPhone X. Last quarter, Apple sold 39.3 million iPhones when you combine all iPhone models. In other words,… Read More

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