How To Rename Multiple Files at One Time in Windows 10 ??

In the Windows 10 File Explorer this process of renaming files in large batches is simple but for many users, myself included, the feature is not well known.
In this Quick Tip article I want to share with you how easy it is do use this capability of File Explorer.


 Process :-  

Step 1 : Select the image you want to rename
In Windows 10 there is always more than one way to accomplish most tasks so once you have File Explorer open to the directory of files you want to rename you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + A to select all of the files or use the Select All button on the Home view of File Explorer.Or select only those image you want to rename at once.

When You have selected the images/files that you want to rename as a group. 
Move to step 2  
Step 2 : Rename the files
Renaming files in a batch is done as you do same with the one file  rename one file .
Once all of the images/files you want to rename are selected, right click on the first image/file and select Rename from the context menu.

You will then have an editable name field for the first image/file in the sequence - just give it whatever name you choose for the group of images/files. Hit the Enter key once you have the new name typed in.

Now you will see all the files with the new name followed by a sequential number in parentheses. You have now successfully renamed your files in one batch.

Here is one last interesting thing with this feature - if you click on any other image/file in the collection it will give that file the first sequential number and then continuing from that image/file in sequential order until it hits the end of the list. At that point it will go back up to the first one and continue to renaming until the file/image just before the one you started the renaming with at the beginning.
So a key aspect of this process is to make sure you have the files in the order you want them numbered in and start with the first image/file in the directory.


Screenshot :-

Synthesize Speech In Any Voice,New Software that can can cause controversy

 

Good luck ever trusting a recording again. as it is right now, records done and presented in court as evidence will hardly have any value. 
A low quality video has emerged from the Adobe conference MAX showing a demo for a prototype of a new software, called Project VoCo, that appears to be a Photoshop for audio.The program is shown synthesizing a man's voice to read different sentences based on the software's analysis of a real clip of him speaking. Just copy and paste to change it from "I kissed my dog and my wife" to "I kissed my wife and my wife." Or even insert entirely new words—they still sound eerily authentic.In case you were confused about what the software's intended purpose is, Adobe issued a statement:

When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative. We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words.

The crowd laughs and cheers uproariously as the program is demod, seemingly unaware of the disturbing implications for a program like this especially in the context of an election cycle where distortions in truth are commonplace. Being able to synthesize —or claim that real audio was synthesized—would only muddy waters even further.

Somehow the clip also involves the comedian Jordan Peele, present at the conference, whose shocked expression is the only indication that anyone there is thinking about how this software will be used out in the real world.

New speech recognition system on par with human capabilities? Microsoft claims it true

Microsoft researchers from the Speech & Dialog research group include, from back left, Wayne Xiong, Geoffrey Zweig, Xuedong Huang, Dong Yu, Frank Seide, Mike Seltzer, Jasha Droppo and Andreas Stolcke. (Photo by Dan DeLong)

Engineers at Microsoft have written a paper describing their new speech recognition system and claim that the results indicate that their system is as good at recognizing conversational speech as humans. The neural network-based system, the team reports, has achieved a historic achievement—a word rate error of 5.9 percent—making it the first ever below 6 percent, and more importantly, demonstrating that its performance is equal to human performance—they describe it as "human parity." They have uploaded their paper to Cornell's arXiv preprint server.

The neural network was taught using recordings made and released by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology—the recordings were created for the purpose of research and included both single-topic and open-topic conversations between two people talking on the telephone. The researchers at Microsoft found that their system had an error rate of 5.9 percent on the single-topic conversations and 11.1 percent on those that were open ended.
As a side note, the researchers report that they also tested the speech recognition skills of humans by having the same phone conversations from NIST sent to a third-party transcription service, which allowed for measuring error rates. They were surprised to find the error rate was higher than expected—5.9 for the single topic conversations and 11.3 percent for open-ended conversations. These findings are in sharp contrast to the general consensus in the scientific community that humans on average have a 4 percent error rate.
The team reports that they believe they can improve their system even more by overcoming obstacles that still confuse their system—namely backchannel communications. These are noises people make during conversation that are not words but still have meaning, such as "uh," "er," and "uh-huh." The neural network still has a hard time figuring out what to do with such noises. We humans use them to allow for pauses, to signify understanding or to communicate uncertainty—or to cue another speaker, such as to signify they should continue with whatever they were talking about.
The researchers also report that the new technology will be used to improve Microsoft's commercial speech recognition system, known as Cortana, and that work will continue both in improving error rates and in getting their system to better understand what the transcribed words actually mean.

methods to detect dishonesty online

A new study by Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, associate professor of information systems and cybersecurity and Cloud Technology Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), describes a method for detecting people dishonestly posting online comments, reviews or tweets across multiple accounts, a practice known as "astroturfing."

The study describes a statistical method that analyzes multiple writing samples. Choo, a member of the UTSA College of Business, and his collaborators found that it's challenging for authors to completely conceal their writing style in their text. Based on word choice, punctuation and context, the method is able to detect whether one person or multiple people are responsible for the samples.
Choo and his co-authors (two former students of his, Jian Peng and Sam Detchon, and Helen Ashman, associate professor of information technology and mathematical sciences at the University of South Australia) used writing samples from the most prolific online commenters on various news web sites, and discovered that many people espousing their opinions online were actually all linked to a few singular writers with multiple accounts.

Credit: University of Texas at San Antonio 

 

"Astroturfing is legal, but it's questionable ethically," Choo said. "As long as social media has been popular, this has existed."
The practice has been used by businesses to manipulate social media users or online shoppers, by having one paid associate post false reviews on web sites about products for sale. It's also used on social media wherein astroturfers create several false accounts to espouse opinions, creating the illusion of a consensus when actually one person is pretending to be many.
"It can be used for any number of reasons," Choo said. "Businesses can use this to encourage support for their products or services, or to sabotage other competing companies by spreading negative opinions through false identities."
Candidates for elected office have also been accused of astroturfing to create the illusion of public support for a cause or a campaign. For example, President George W. Bush, the Tea Party movement, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have all been accused of astroturfing to claim widespread enthusiasm for their platforms.
Now that Choo has the capability to detect one person pretending to be many online, he is considering further applications for his top-tier research. Stressing that astroturfing, while frowned upon, is not illegal, he's now looking into whether the algorithm can be used to prevent plagiarism and contract cheating.
"In addition to raising public awareness of the problem, we hope to develop tools to detect astroturfers so that social media users can make informed choices and resist online social manipulation and propaganda," Choo said.

Microsoft researchers test achieve low error rate for conversational speech recognition system

  in  impressively

The languages that we speak: how pervasive will they be in the computing of tomorrow? We are often being told that we are getting closer and closer to computers understanding our words as easily as a human beside us.

Now Microsoft researchers have every reason to feel especially proud. According to reports, Microsoft has stepped in front in the race for supremacy in speech recognition.
The company has claimed a significant test result in their quest for machines to understand speech. The study describing their work has been posted arXiv server. The title is "The Microsoft 2016 Conversational Speech Recognition System." Authors are eight: W. Xiong, J. Droppo, X. Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolcke, D. Yu, G. Zweig.
Wall Street Pit had a report about their work, one of a number of sites paying attention to what Microsoft researchers achieved. The Microsoft team turned to "a conversational telephone speech recognition test used as an industry standard," said Wall Street Pit. That test is the "US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2000 Switchboard speech recognition task."
Chief speech scientist for Microsoft, Xuedong Huang, said their researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3%, considered the lowest in the industry.
Richard Eckel posted a piece about it, too, on the Microsoft site. The posting noted some features of their efforts. Earlier this year, Microsoft researchers won a computer vision challenge by using "a deep residual neural net system that utilized a new kind of cross-layer network connection."
It also said that "Another critical component to Microsoft researchers' recent success is the Computational Network Toolkit. CNTK implements sophisticated optimizations that enable deep learning algorithms to run an order of magnitude faster than before. A key step forward was a breakthrough for parallel training on graphics processing units, or GPUs."
(GPUs are known for computer graphics, but researchers find they are also very good for processing complex algorithms such as the ones used to understand speech, the posting said.)
As for the significance of the error rate, "Last weekend, the international conference speech communication and technology called 'Interspeech' was held in San Francisco," said Wall Street Pit. "During the event, IBM proudly announced that it was able to reach a WER of only 6.6%. Over two decades ago, the top error rate of the best published research system for computer speech recognition was at 43%."

The authors stated, "Our best single system achieves an error rate of 6.9% on the NIST 2000 Switchboard set. We believe this is the best performance reported to date for a recognition system not based on system combination. "
Liam Tung in ZDNet noted progress in this field. Tung wrote that "20 years ago the lowest error rate in speech recognition was 43 percent and that was achieved by IBM in 1995. By 2004, IBM had cut its error rate to 15.2 percent."
Tung noted that "However, these days with more research funds being funnelled into deep neural networks, tech giants are boasting error rates of well below 10 percent, but not quite at a level that exceeds human-level accuracy, which IBM estimates to be at about four percent."
In describing the system, the authors said, "Inspired by machine learning ensemble techniques, the system uses a range of convolutional and recurrent neural networks."
What distinguishes their work from previous work was explained in the paper. "Compared to earlier applications of CNNs to speech recognition, our networks are much deeper, and use linear bypass connections across convolutional layers."
Tung remarked that "Like its rivals, Microsoft has made artificial intelligence a key plank in its strategy for human-computer interaction with voice-based platforms such as Cortana set to play a key role in enabling computing in wearables, mobile, the home, vehicles, and the enterprise."

Breaking the fourth wall in human-computer interaction: Really talking to each other

Hold a conversation with Harry Potter! Interactive Systems Group, The University of Texas at El Paso, CC BY-ND

Have you ever talked to your computer or smartphone? Maybe you've seen a coworker, friend or relative do it. It was likely in the form of a question, asking for some basic information, like the location of the best nearby pizza place or the start time of tonight's sporting event. Soon, however, you may find yourself having entirely different interactions with your device – even learning its name, favorite color and what it thinks about while you are away.

It is now possible to interact with computers in ways that seemed beyond our dreams a few decades ago. Witness the huge success of applications as diverse as Siri, Apple's voice-response personal assistant, and, more recently, the Pokémon Go augmented reality video game. These apps, and many others, enable technology to enhance people's lives, jobs and recreation.
Yet the potential for future progress goes well beyond just the newest novelty game or gadget. When properly merged, computers can become virtual companions, performing many roles and tasks that require awareness of physical surroundings as well as human needs, preferences and even personality. In the near future, these technologies can help us create virtual teachers, coaches, trainers, therapists and nurses, among others. They are not meant to replace human beings, but to enhance people's lives, especially in places where real people who perform these roles are hard to find.
This is serious next-level augmented reality, allowing a machine to understand and react to you as you exist in the real physical world. My colleagues and I focus on breaking the fourth wall of human-computer interaction, letting you and computer talk to each other – about yourselves.
Bringing computers to life
Our goal was to help people build rapport with virtual characters and analyze the importance of "natural interaction" – without controllers, keyboard, mouse, text or additional screens.

To make the technology relatable, we created a Harry Potter "clone" by using IBM's Watson artificial intelligence systems and our own in-house software. Through a microphone, you could ask our virtual Harry anything about his life, provided there was a reference for it in one of the seven books.

Since then we have also built a museum guide that helps visually impaired people to experience art. Our prototype character, named Sara, resides in a gallery in Queretaro, Mexico, where people can talk to her and ask about the artwork also on display.

We also created a "Jeopardy"-style game host, with whom you can play the popular trivia game filled with questions about our university. You talk to the character as if he were a real host, choosing the category you want to play and answering questions.
We even have our own virtual tour guide at the Interactive Research Group laboratory at UTEP. She answers any questions our hundreds of yearly visitors may have, or asks the researchers to help her out if it is a tough question.
Our most advanced project is a survival scenario where you need to talk, gesture and interact with a virtual character to survive on a deserted island for a fictional week (about an hour in real time). You befriend the character, build a fire, go fishing, find water and shelter, and escape other dangers until you get rescued, using just your voice and full-body gesture tracking.

A researcher interacts through speech and gesture with Adriana, the jungle survival virtual character. Credit: Interactive Systems Group, The University of Texas at El Paso, CC BY-ND

Understanding humans
These projects are fun to "play" for a reason. When we build human-like characters, we have to understand people – how we move, talk, gesture and what it means when you put everything together. This doesn't happen in an instant. Our projects are fun and engaging to keep people interested in the interaction for a long time.
We try to make them forget that there are sensors and cameras hidden in the room helping our characters read body posture and listen to their words. While people interact, we analyze how they behave, and look for different reactions to controlled characters' personality changes, gestures, speech tones and rhythms, and even small things like breathing, blinking and gaze movement.
The next steps are clearly bringing these characters outside of their flat screens and virtual worlds, either to have people join them in their virtual environments through virtual reality, or to have the characters appear present in the real world through augmented reality.
We're building on functions – particularly graphic enhancements – that have been around for several years. Several GPS-based games, like Pokémon Go, are available for mobile devices. Microsoft's Kinect system for Xbox lets players try on different clothing articles, or adds an exotic location background to a video of the person, making it appear as if they were there.
More advanced systems can alter our perspective of the world more subtly – and yet more powerfully. For example, people can now touch, manipulate and even feel virtual objects. There are devices that can simulate smells, making visual scenes of beaches or forests far more immersive. Some systems even let a user choose how certain foods taste through a combination of visual effects and smell augmentation.

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A vast and growing potential
All these are but rough sketches of what augmented reality technology could one day allow. So far most work is still heavily centered in video games, but many fields – such as health care, education, military simulation and training, and architecture – are already using it for professional purposes.
For now, most of these devices operate independently from one another, rather than as a whole ecosystem. What would happen if we combined haptic (touch), smell, taste, visuals and geospatial (GPS) information at the same time? And then what if we add in a virtual companion to share the experience with?
Unfortunately, it's common for new technology to be met with fear, or portrayed as dangerous – as in movies like "The Matrix," "Her" or "Ex-Machina," where people live in a dystopian virtual reality world, fall in love with their computers or get killed by robots designed to be indistinguishable from humans. But there is great potential too.
One of the most common questions we get is about the potential misuse of our research, or if it is possible for the computers to attain a will of their own – think "I, Robot" and the "Terminator" movies, where the machines are actually built and operating in the physical world. I would like to think that our research as a community will be used to create incredible experiences, fun and engaging scenarios, and to help people in their daily lives. To that end, if you ask any of our characters if they are planning to take over the world, they will tease you and check their calendar out loud before saying, "No, I won't."

How to Stop windows 10 Anniversary Update’s privacy settings

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update has dropped, bringing a significant number of under-the-hood changes to the operating system. We’ve written many times about Windows 10 privacy issues over the past year, but haven’t gathered up our recommendations and strategies into a single story until now. Want to lock down your install and improve security? You’ve come to the right place.
Before we get started, there are two ways to talk about Windows 10 privacy, both of which are valid. The first one is to go hardcore: There are steps you can take to block Windows 10 from phoning home to Microsoft, or relaying any telemetry at all, even for home users. But those methods also require some fairly sophisticated additional tools, or at least a deeper understanding of Windows functions than many users may be comfortable with. For example, one challenge with locking down Windows 10 is that certain URLs are hardcoded into the operating system and can’t be blocked by any changes to your PC. These URLs can only be locked out via a separate firewall or by modifying your router to do so (if your router supports this function). Furthermore, there’s no practical way to prevent Microsoft from pushing an update that changes the addresses and obviates the bypass you had set up.
So let’s put that aside, and for now go the other way, in a simpler direction. Without going to more drastic measures, we’ll show you can lock down your own system far more than it is after a stock Windows 10 install and ensure your data stays local. The truth is, Microsoft offers a great deal of fine-grained options with Windows 10 — including the ability to adjust privacy settings in ways that were sorely lacking in previous versions of the OS.

A step above Windows 8

When Windows 8 was under development, Microsoft repeatedly highlighted how it would require applications to disclose how they accessed and used user information. This turned out to be a meaningless feature, because while MS did indeed require applications to disclose the data they gathered, it gave the end user no actual choice or control over how that information was used.
Windows 10 isn’t quite as robust as some might like, but Microsoft does offer a number of fine-grained, application-level controls. We’ll touch on some of the specific areas of interest below, but most of these sections follow a common format. Each menu item offers you the option to control privacy settings for that device or capability and most can be fine-tuned at the application level. Windows 10’s Anniversary Update will let you decide to share your microphone with Skype, for example, but not with any other program.

The “General” privacy page contains a number of high-level options you’ll want to disable. Turning off the Advertising ID prevents Windows 10 from tracking you across multiple applications and showing you ads that cross app boundaries. For example, if you click on a number of ads in Application A, MS would like to remember that and show you similar ads in Application B.
Turning off Smart Screen actually isn’t recommended, but I’m taking these screenshots off my own rig and I keep it disabled here, because it’s got a nasty habit of blocking benchmarks and other products I use for work. If you don’t need to shut it off, you shouldn’t do so. The other options on this page allow MS to share and synchronize data between applications so you could open an application on one laptop, then continue using it on a different machine.
I’ve left the languages option checked because I don’t care if Microsoft knows I speak English. If you do, this can also be disabled.

Next up: Location. The first options on this slide allow you to control how location settings are set for each account on a machine. You can turn Location Services off globally, or allow the function to run but control it on an application-by-application basis. If you want Windows to be able to give you general information by, say, zip code as opposed to your street address, you can also enable or disable that function. Finally, you can choose to set a default location if you don’t want to give precise information but still want the computer to know what city you live in.
Scroll down from these options (not shown) and you can set your location data on an application-by-application level. Geofencing — knowing whether a system has crossed into or out of a specific location — can also be controlled in this fashion. Microsoft tells you if any applications on your system use geofencing (none of mine do, so I can’t really show the outcome).

Speech, Inking, and Typing is an extremely important section for locking down your own privacy. You’ll see various options on this page depending on whether Cortana is currently enabled on your system. While you can’t completely disable Cortana on Microsoft 10, that’s partly because of how Microsoft has combined its “Search” functionality with Cortana’s capabilities.

This needs to be unpacked a bit. Before Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Microsoft referred to desktop search as “Search,” and Cortana was its digital assistant. Microsoft has since unified search and Cortana and now refers to the entire edifice as Cortana. So in one sense, no, you can’t turn “Cortana” off, because Cortana now encompasses both desktop search and the personal digital assistant. But you can refrain from using Cortana’s digital assistance capabilities, and you can deactivate her ability to gather data about you.
If you want to turn Cortana off and the box in this window reads “Stop getting to know me” instead of the reverse, you can click that box to disable her, and then visit your Bing personalization page to wipe information Cortana has previously gathered about you, wipe your search history, or delete previous interests and news items you’ve told Bing to aggregate on your behalf.

Other Devices contains some additional information you’ll want to check. This is where Microsoft sets permissions related to how data is shared across devices. You can choose to allow apps that synchronize across devices to use that functionality here, enable automatic content sharing for trusted devices, and enable or disable the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). The Windows 10 Phone Companion application can also be enabled or disabled from this screen.

The Feedback and Diagnostics panel gives you several important options regarding Windows feedback and the collection of telemetry. Telemetry gathering can’t be completely turned off in Windows 10, but you can dial it back to the most rudimentary level, Basic, that Microsoft allows.

Moving beyond Windows 10’s privacy settings

We’ve covered the various options embedded in Windows 10’s own settings. Windows 10 Pro owners have the option to make some additional changes via Gpedit.msc, but Microsoft doesn’t ship the Group Policy Editor on Windows 10 Home. Gpedit.msc can be acquired online, but it’s not the easiest or simplest way to make certain changes to Windows 10’s privacy settings.
One alternative is to download a third-party utility that can make certain changes for you. There are a number to choose from, though some may not work with Windows Anniversary Update. One we can confirm does work is Spybot’s Anti-Beacon for Windows 10:

Anti-Beacon is specifically designed to block Microsoft’s telemetry gathering, which puts it in a different category from the application-level privacy we’ve been discussing. While it’s far from the only tool in use to lock down Windows 10, it’s one of the few produced by a known software house (Spybot is also responsible for Spybot Search and Destroy). We recommend giving it a look if you want to further control what Windows 10 does and doesn’t share about you in the future. Be advised that if you choose to block Bing URLs, you won’t be able to access the search engine at all (the option to block Bing is in the “Optional” tab.)
Questions? Comments? Other issues you’d like us to address? Sound off in the comments and let us know.