Mediaboss Marketing

A Danish girls' choir met a "completely unexpected" VIP audience member on the sidewalkBarack Obamaat their latest rehearsal in Copenhagen on Sunday.

A video of the encounter (which was first posted by the choral group UngKlang as an Instagram story) was shared by Reddit user DingoDamp, and it has since gone viral. It had received 132,000 upvotes on Reddit at the time of writing. See the video originally shared on Instagram here.

The caption of the Reddit post said: "Former U.S. President Barack Obama came across a choir of Danish girls practicing their singing in their apartment with their balcony doors open. He kindly asked them if they would keep singing for him to enjoy."

The choir was rehearsing on a balcony opposite Hotel d'Angleterre, where Obama was staying while in town for the 2022 Copenhagen Democracy Summit and other engagements, when the former president stepped out from the hotel's basement.

In a post on Instagram sharing another view of Obama looking up at the balcony, the choir wrote: "Today our rehearsals started out completely unexpected and amazing! We have just started rehearsing for our upcoming projects, after which we hear a little street noise from the balcony. Suddenly, former President Obama steps out of D'Angleterre's basement and catches sight of us." See the Instagram post shared by UngKlang here.

According to the post, looking up at the group in "amazement," the former president said: "Hello, what are you doing?"

When the choir replied: "We're singing," Obama said: "Oh, let me hear," according to the post, which shows him waving to the group and gesturing with his hand to one of his ears.

The choir sang a portion of Hans Christian Andersen's "In Denmark I Was Born," after which a "very impressed" Obama reportedly said: "Wow, that was fantastic" asking the group about who they are and what they do, as per the Instagram post.

Obama wished them a good day before being driven away, according to the choir, who said it took an hour "before we had fallen to the ground again" following the encounter.

On Friday, Obama delivered remarks at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit during a session titled "Democratic Organizing in the Digital Age," discussing the "challenges to democracy around the globe" and "the importance of a positive vision for democracy" as well as how the next generation of leaders can "chart a better course," the Obama Foundation said.

He told attendees at the event, which was dominated by discussions on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's future global role, they will "have to fight" for democracy in an age of political upheaval and looming global crises.

"We will have to nurture it, we will have to demonstrate its value again and again in improving the lives of ordinary people," the former president said.

More:
Barack Obama Surprises Danish Girl Choir After Hearing Them From Sidewalk

Former President Obama said that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was still vulnerable to politicians who choose to ignore its remarkable benefits to the U.S.

In an emailed statement on the programs 10th anniversary, Obama said that while the program was always meant to be temporary, Dreamers had to live through the cruelty of the previous administrations attacks and legal challenges to the program, their families and their communities.

The former president added that he is renewing his call for Congress to offer Dreamers a path to citizenship.

Lets honor these Dreamers and everything theyve done to strengthen our country. Lets treat them like the Americans that they are. And lets do everything we can to help build a common sense immigration system that honors our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants, he said.

DACA was implemented during the Obama administration in an effort to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors after the then-presidentslegislative attempts to modernize the immigration system failed.

Since then, DACA has seen several challenges. The Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administrations efforts to end the program on procedural grounds in 2020. Next month, a case over DACA will head to court in Texas, where the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments against the program.

According to Obama, many of the undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. when they were very young did not know they were undocumented until they applied to college or tried to enlist in the military.

And not only did a piece of paper suddenly stand in the way of their aspirations, it added a threat of deportation to a country they might not know, with a language they might not speak, he said.

He added that the Obama administration made it possible for them to apply for work authorization and protection from deportation through DACA.

Obama said that the program recipients were able to stop living in fear and instead live freely in the only country they know.

It lifted the shadow of deportation from people of extraordinary promise. And the resultsfor them and for us allcannot be denied, he added.

He added that these Dreamers now face increasing challenges and that only a quarter of the undocumented students graduating high school this year are eligible for DACA under existing rules.

More than 800,000 people have received DACA since the programs inception, including 200,000 people who served as front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Obama said.

A White House officialtold The Hill that it will host more than 20Dreamers on Wednesday for discussions on preserving DACA protections.

The rest is here:
Obama on DACA anniversary: Lets treat Dreamers like the Americans they are - The Hill

Sasha Obama keeps proving shes got such a stunning and unique style sense. The former first daughter rocked a colorful mismatched outfit while filling her car up with gas in Los Angeles, and managed to show off her silver belly button piercing in the process.

The 21-year-old wore a cropped, tie-dyed sweatshirt along with a low-slung skirt with a black waistband and green, blue, orange and purple pattern blocks along with a knee-high slit. Sasha opted for comfy footwear, donning a pair of blue and pink Nike trainers while adding several beaded necklaces.

While she looked fantastic, the college coed never cracked a smile. Thats probably because all grades of gas were more than $7 per gallon at the location she stopped at, and it likely cost a pretty penny to fill up her black SUV.

The youngest Obama daughter has been getting praise for her fashion sense as she grew into a stylish teen while her father Barack Obama, was president from 2008 through 2016. The year after her dad left office, music superstar Drake posted a snapshot of Sasha to his Instagram page calling her a style popper.

It helped that she was wearing a baseball cap featuring the logo from his OvO brand along with her sunglasses and blue shirt. But getting a fashion compliment from Drake in such a public manner earned Sasha major style points!

Just like her older sister, Malia Obama, 23, Sasha is now living in the City of Angels, after transferring to the University of Southern California in 2021 despite starting her college career at the University of Michigan. Also like her sibling, Sasha has a handsome boyfriend.

Shes been spotted out with commercial directorClifton Cliff Powell Jr., whose father is a veteran Hollywood actor. Her mom, former First Lady Michelle Obama, gushed to Ellen DeGeneres during an April stop by her daytime talk show that both of her daughters are doing well as grown, independent adults and are just amazing young women. The world first got to known Malia and Sasha as young 10- and 8-year-old girls when their dad won his bid for the White House in 2008.

They loved the Jonas Brothers. Now they are bringing grown men home, Michelle jokingly noted, adding, Before it was just, like, pop bands. Now they have boyfriends and real lives. While Sasha has Cliff, Malia has been dating her British boyfriend, Rory Farquharson, since they met at Harvard in 2017.

Scroll down to see more photos of Sasha during her fashionable gas station run.

The rest is here:
Sasha Obama Shows Off Silver Belly Button Piercing in Cropped Sweatshirt While Getting Gas in L.A. - Life&Style Weekly

As schools and workplaces begin resuming in-person operations, we project a permanent increase in the volume of online meetings and calls. And while communication and collaboration solutions have played a critical role in enabling continuity during these unprecedented times, early stress tests have revealed opportunities to improve and enhance meeting and call quality.

Disruptive echo effects, poor room acoustics, and choppy video are some common issues that hinder the effectiveness of online calls and meetings. Through AI and machine learning, which have become fundamental to our strategy for continual improvement, weve identified and are now delivering innovative enhancements in Microsoft Teams that improve such audio and video challenges in ways that are both user-friendly and scalable across environments.

Today, were announcing the availability of new Teams features including echo cancellation, adjusting audio in poor acoustic environments, and allowing users to speak and hear at the same time without interruptions. These build on AI-powered features recently released like expanding background noise suppression.

During calls and meetings, when a participant has their microphone too close to their speaker, its common for sound to loop between input and output devices, causing an unwanted echo effect. Now, Microsoft Teams uses AI to recognize the difference between sound from a speaker and the users voice, eliminating the echo without suppressing speech or inhibiting the ability of multiple parties to speak at the same time.

In specific environments, room acoustics can cause sound to bounce, or reverberate, causing the users voice to sound shallow as if theyre speaking within a cavern. For the first time, Microsoft Teams uses a machine learning model to convert captured audio signal to sound as if users are speaking into a close-range microphone.

A natural element of conversation is the ability to interrupt for clarification or validation. This is accomplished through full-duplex (two-way) transmission of audio, allowing users to speak and hear others at the same time. When not using a headset, and especially when using devices where the speaker and microphone are very close to each other, it is difficult to remove echo while maintaining full-duplex audio. Microsoft Teams uses a model trained with 30,000 hours of speech samples to retain desired voices while suppressing unwanted audio signals resulting in more fluid dialogue.

Each of us has first-hand experience of a meeting disrupted by the unexpected sounds of a barking dog, a car alarm, or a slammed door. Over two years ago, we announced the release of AI-based noise suppression in Microsoft Teams as an optional feature for Windows users. Since then, weve continued a cycle of iterative development, testing, and evaluation to further optimize our model. After recording significant improvements across key user metrics, we have enabled machine learning-based noise suppression as default for Teams customers using Windows (including Microsoft Teams Rooms), as well as Mac and iOS users. A future release of this feature is planned for Teams Android and web clients.

These AI-driven audio enhancements are rolling out and are expected to be generally available in the coming months.

We have also recently released AI-based video and screen sharing quality optimization breakthroughs for Teams. From adjustments for low light to optimizations based on the type of content being shared, we now leverage AI to help you look and present your best.

The impact of presentations can often depend on an audiences ability to read on-screen text or watch a shared video. But different types of shared content require varied approaches to ensure the highest video quality, particularly under bandwidth constraints. Teams now uses machine learning to detect and adjust the characteristics of the content presented in real-time, optimizing the legibility of documents or smoothness of video playback.

Unexpected issues with network bandwidth can lead to a choppy video that can quickly shift the focus of your presentation. AI-driven optimizations in Teams help adjust playback in challenging bandwidth conditions, so presenters can use video and screen sharing worry-free.

Though you cant always control the surrounding lighting for your meetings, new AI-powered filters in Teams give you the option to adjust brightness and add a soft focus for your meetings with a simple toggle in your device settings, to better accommodate for low-light environments.

The past two years have made clear how important communication and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams are to maintaining safe, connected, and productive operations. In addition to bringing new features and capabilities to Teams, well continue to explore new ways to use technology to make online calling and meeting experiences more natural, resilient, and efficient.

Visit the Tech Community Teams blog for more technical details about how we leverage AI and machine learning for audio quality improvements as well as video and screen sharing optimization in Microsoft Teams.

Read more from the original source:
How Microsoft Teams uses AI and machine learning to improve calls and meetings - Microsoft

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use. (Photo: PCMag)In a new blog post, Google says its going to be bringing new features to Chrome via on device machine learning (ML). The goal is to improve the browsing experience, and to do so its adding several new ML models that will focus on different tasks. Googles says itll begin addressing how web notifications are handled, and that it also has ideas for an adaptive tool bar. These new features will lead to a safer, more accessible and more personalized browsing experience according to Google. Also, since the models run (and stay) on your device instead of in the cloud, its theoretically better for your privacy.

First theres web notifications, which we take to mean this kind of stuff. Things like sign up for our newsletter, for example. Google says these are update from sites you care about, but adds that too many of them are a nuisance. It says in an upcoming version of Chrome, the on-device ML will examine how you interact with notifications. If it finds you are denying permission to certain types of notification requests, it will silence similar ones in the future. If a notification is silenced automatically, Chrome will still add a notification for it, shown below. This would seemingly allow you to override Googles prediction.

Google also wants Chrome to change what the tool bar does based on your past behavior. For example, it says some people like to use voice search in the morning on their train commute (this person sounds annoying). Other people routinely share links. In both of these situations, Chrome would anticipate your needs and add either a microphone button or share icon in the tool bar, making the process easier. Youll be able to customize it manually as well. The screenshots provided note theyre from Chrome on Android. Its unclear if this functionality will appear on other platforms.

In addition to these new features, Google is also touting the work machine learning is already doing for Chrome users. For example, when you arrive at a web page its scanned and compared to a database of known phishing/malicious sites. If theres a match it gives you a warning, and youve probably seen this once or twice already. Its a full-page, all-red page block, so youd know it if youve seen it. Google says it rolled out new ML models in March of this year that increased the number of malicious sites it could detect by 2.5X.

Google doesnt specify when these new features will launch, nor does it say if they will be mobile-only. All we know is the silence notifications will appear in the next release of Chrome. According to our browser, version 102 is the current one. For the adaptive tool bar, it says that will arrive in the near future. Its also unclear if running these models on-device will incur some type of performance hit.

Now Read:

Read more:
Google to Make Chrome 'More Helpful' With New Machine Learning Additions - ExtremeTech