If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Lots of people keep their Amazon Echo or other Alexa-enabled smart speaker in the kitchen, mostly because it's a central location in the home. However, this is actually a great place to use Alexa, as she has a host of under-appreciated kitchen skills. Sure, you can set timers and convert measurements with Alexa, but she can do so much more than that--from finding you recipes to maintaining your grocery list and suggesting wine pairings.

Yesterday I attended Spotify's Big Data & Machine Learning panel at Galvanize in NYC. Going in I had a few select questions, mainly why my #1 song on my 2016 Year in Review was "Venus" by Lady Gaga, despite all the times I set it to Private Mode for my ritualistic guilty pleasure listening sessions. More importantly than that, I came to learn how big data and machine learning are used by the engineers over at Spotify. With over 100M registered users worldwide, Spotify has many unique data and AI challenges. There's 25 billion data points within Spotify's database, 100 million music preferences to catalog and cater to, over 30M songs, and 2 billion playlists across 60 countries.

An image of a single atom of the metal strontium suspended in electric fields has won a prestigious science photography prize. David Nadlinger's photo, Single Atom In An Ion Tap, was captured through the window of a vacuum chamber in an Oxford University laboratory, using an ordinary digital camera on a long exposure shot. Two metal electrodes, two millimetres apart, held the strontium almost motionless as it was illuminated with a blue-violet-coloured laser. The image beat more than 100 entries to claim first place overall in the 2018 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) science photography competition. Mr Nadlinger said: 'The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the minuscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality.

Tool can detect 94% of Isis propaganda with a 99.99% success rate in tests An artificial intelligence program that can detect Islamic State propaganda online with a 94% success rate has been developed, the Home Office has announced. The technology could stop the majority of Isis videos from reaching the internet by analysing the audio and images of a video file during the uploading process, and rejecting extremist content. The tool, which has been developed in partnership by the Home Office and ASI Data Science, will be made available to all internet platforms, although many major tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter already use similar technology on their own websites. The tool is aimed at tackling extremist content on smaller platforms like Vimeo, Telegraph and pCloud, which have seen a large rise in Isis propaganda. The terror group has used 400 different websites to upload their content last year, research has found.

A man walks through the Watson Premier display to learn about IBM Watson at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 9, 2018. As developments, standards and controversy around Artificial Intelligence (AI) explodes, compelling new groups are emerging that will drive expansion and implementation of AI at a new pace and depth. However, one such exclusive, burgeoning collective entitled #AIShowbiz Executive Roundtable is making particular moves. This Roundtable is one of the first business communities in the country solely dedicated to the intersection of AI and the entertainment industry, and it has powerful plans for 2018. In fact, the #AIShowbiz Executive Roundtable is an ancillary property of the larger #AIShowbiz Summit which actually just completed its second-year of panels and keynotes with various influencers in AI from around the world during a day-long conference in Los Angeles, California.

Aliens could trigger apocalypse on Earth without even visiting our planet. That's according to a new study by scientists in Hawaii that claims ET could send humanity a message hiding malicious AI. We should consider deleting messages from aliens without reading them to avoid havoc on Earth, the researchers claim. Not only do these messages have the potential to contain AI that can shut down power systems, opening them can also alert aliens to our whereabouts. Aliens could trigger apocalypse on Earth without even visiting our planet.

Factmata, a London-based company working on machine learning technology able to counter fake news online, has raised £700,000 ($1 million) in seed from a number of investors-- although it has not released its product yet. The round was backed by high-profile personalities such as Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and freedom of information activist Craig Newmark. Past investors include such heavy-weights as Mark Cuban, Mark Pincus, Ross Mason and Sunil Paul. The company is currently piloting a number of projects aimed at flagging up fake news, clickbait, misleading information, and otherwise bad content currently infesting the web. In an interview with TechCrunch, company's founder and CEO Dhruv Ghulati-- a machine learning specialist-- explained that what Factmata is gunning for is a ""community-driven AI: How do we take a machine learning model where you get data to train your model, perhaps pay 10,000 people to flag content?

Do you remember Hollywood movies Terminator: Rise of Machines or Ex Machina where facial recognition technologies are used in several ways? Today with digital technological advances, face recognition has become very important for businesses, to know who the customer is and send hyper-personalized offers to generate more revenues. Facebook has used facial recognition technology since 2011, to speed up the process of tagging friends or people in photos. When a user uploads an image to Facebook, the site's algorithms recognize the faces of friends and asks users if they would like to tag them. Security agencies were also early adopters of face recognition to identify suspicious behavior & threats to any big event or crowded areas like airports.

Advertising watchdog rejects Echo Dot owner's complaint that TV spot was irresponsible An Amazon Echo owner has tried to get a television advertising campaign for the smart speaker banned after the Alexa virtual assistant attempted to order cat food when it heard its name on an ad. An Amazon TV ad for the Echo Dot, which can perform functions such as make shopping lists and play music with voice commands, features people using the device in different situations. In one a man's voice says: "Alexa, reorder Purina cat food." Alexa responds: "I've found Purina cat food. Would you like to buy it?" A viewer lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), saying that the ad was irresponsible because it caused their Echo Dot to order cat food.