EA showed off some Battlefront II footage at today, and it looks awesome. According to EA boss Andrew Wilson, the developers considered all “constructive. I only remember one practical writing lesson from my three years as an English major: Whenever you can, put the best bits at the end of the sentence. Advanced Features from mSpy. Apart from tracking all the standard and basic features such as Text messages, Phone call logs, Email and Web browser history, Real Time. Making brilliant use of this portable platform and busting with imagination, Tearaway is a Vita dream come true. At its most basic, the game is a basic 3D platformer. The case has magnetic points where Mophie’s Charge Force battery pack attaches, wirelessly charging your phone while adhering to it. You can also leave the battery.
Holy crap, that is a huge friggin’ payout. Health insurance giant Anthem Inc.
Health Insurance Giant Agrees to Record $1. Million Payout Over Data Breach. Holy crap, that is a huge friggin’ payout. Health insurance giant Anthem Inc. That’s a new record, for those of you keeping count. Americans are sick and tired of constantly getting notices about how their social security numbers and credit cards have been compromised. Sure, the company has agreed to pay for credit monitoring for the millions of people affected by the breach—but as anyone whose house has ever burned down can tell you, insurance is not a magic wand.
Anyway, moving on.. Anthem has also agreed to guarantee “a certain level of funding for information security and to implement or maintain numerous specific changes to its data security systems, including encryption of certain information and archiving sensitive data with strict access controls,” according to Cyberscoop. No doubt doing so prior to 2.
Most of the money will pay for the aforementioned credit monitoring, although roughly $3. Victims already enrolled in a credit monitoring service (because, let’s face it, who isn’t at this point) may opt to receive a check instead—probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $5. As part of the settlement, Anthem will not formally recognize any wrongdoing on its part, which is pretty standard in these types of deals.
The terms, however, still have to be approved by the San Jose judge presiding over the case, which represents an amalgamation of more than 1. Anthem since the breach. While the Anthem incident was allegedly a hack that didn’t involve any medical records or credit card details, approximately 7. But at least Anthem learned a lesson.
Hopefully, others will too.
Facebook Researchers Used Celebrity Bitmoji to Help Create VR Avatars. Researchers at Facebook AI Research and Tel Aviv University school of computer science published a preprint paper outlining how they created an automatic process to create VR avatars. The company’s new Facebook Spaces “social” VR venture launched this week. The process of how Facebook set out to solve the problem of automatically generating VR avatars based on photos is fascinating, but what’s even more interesting is the method used to help train its AI to create VR avatars: It used and mimicked avatars created using Snap Inc.’s Bitmoji service as part of its dataset. The researchers first transformed a set of celebrity photos into 2. D avatars and compared the results to manually created Bitmoji avatars of the celebs, then the Facebook- created 2. D avatars were transformed into VR avatars.
The paper explains the way Bitmoji was used in the process: The proposed TOS . In this task, we transfer an “in- the- wild” facial photograph to a set of parameters that defines an emoji.
As the unlabeled training data of face images (domain X ), we use a set s of one million random images without identity information. The set t consists of assorted facial avatars (emoji) created by an online service (bitmoji. The emoji images were processed by an automatic process that detects, based on a set of heuristics, the center of the irises and the tip of the nose . Based on these coordinates, the emoji were centered and scaled into 1. The emoji engine of the online service is mostly additive. In order to train the TOS, we mimic it and have created a neural network e that maps properties such as gender, length of hair, shape of eyes, etc. The researchers say that the “emoji engine of the online service is mostly additive,” and the team mimicked the way Bitmoji works to help automatically create avatars.
You can see the Bitmoji the researchers created, side- by- side the avatars the Tied Output Synthesis (TOS). Based on the language used, it doesn’t appear as if the Bitmoji avatars were used in the machine learning process—that is, the system wasn’t trained based on the Bitmoji the team manually created for each photograph—instead, the team used the Bitmoji as a comparison data point when trying to make the avatars look as accurate as possible. I haven’t thought about Shane West in years.)Still, given how much copying Facebook is already doing of other Snap features (Miranda Kerr is not pleased!), it’s hilarious to see that company’s products in an academic paper touting Facebook’s advanced methods for automatic avatar creation.