Young children are spending record time on hand-held devices. According to new data published on Thursday, the amount of time under-5s devote to watching TV and video content via such appliances is now 2.8 hours, per day. That's an increase three out of four infants aged under five have regular access to a computer or mobile tablet. Last year, they spent 2.6 hours each day, but this has now risen to 2.8 hours. In addition, the majority of pre-school children also have their very own gadget.

If you still believe that your daily activities are the result of your own choices, you are mistaken. Few of us understand that our purchasing decisions, and increasingly our life decisions, are heavily influenced by advanced algorithms. In this piece, you'll learn about: Algorithms divide potential customers into groups on the basis of their behavior, interests or decisions that they make. They don't just analyze data, they predict the path customers will take in the future and, for example, cleverly controlling product margins. A collection of all this information (defined by Gartner as "Information of Everything") is enough to effectively build behavioral profiles that allow customer contact to be revolutionized.

H2O.ai, the open source leader in AI, has been named a "Top 3 Vendor" in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning by industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in its latest report titled "EMA Top 3 Enterprise Decision Guide for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)," based on the innovations of its enterprise-ready automated machine learning platform, H2O Driverless AI. The new report from EMA provides guidance for enterprises on how to optimally leverage today's AI and ML capabilities depending on their individual situation and priorities, specifically highlighting the top three enterprise software products in the industry it recommends should be included in product evaluations. Each of the Top 3 Vendors EMA were chosen based on end user research, market analysis, technical product reviews and expert interviews to provide enterprise customers with pragmatic guidance to optimally benefit from AI and ML. In the EMA report, H2O.ai is specifically recognized for "its vision of creating an AI and ML tool that ultimately aims to allow almost everyone within the business to create their own predictive models," and how that vision is executed in H2O Driverless AI. The automated machine learning platform empowers data scientists or data analysts to work on projects faster and more efficiently by using automation and state-of-the-art computing power to accomplish tasks that can take humans months in just minutes or hours by delivering automatic feature engineering, model validation, model tuning, model selection and deployment, machine learning interpretability, time-series, NLP and automatic pipeline generation for model scoring.

Carl Vondrick is a doctoral candidate and researcher at MIT, where he studies computer vision and machine learning. His research focuses include leveraging large-scale data with minimal annotation and its applications to predictive vision and scene understanding. Recently his work has received a lot of media attention, including features in Forbes, Wired, CNN and PopSci, and other media outlets worldwide. As part of his work with MIT CSAIL, Carl built a deep learning vision system for AI to learn and understand human behaviour and interactions, using popular TV shows like The Office, Desperate Housewives, and YouTube videos. The resulting algorithm analyzes videos, then uses what it learns to predict how humans will behave.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 4, 2018--Lemonade, the insurance company powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, today announced the appointment of Jorge Espinel as its Chief Business Development Officer, reporting directly to Lemonade CEO and cofounder Daniel Schreiber. Espinel comes to Lemonade from Spotify, where he ran business development worldwide. His main focus at Lemonade will be to grow Lemonade's product offering and reach through strategic partnerships and corporate development initiatives. "For years we've admired how Spotify achieved spectacular growth through innovative partnerships. Few people and few companies have accomplished what Jorge did with Spotify," said Shai Wininger, Lemonade COO and cofounder.

Headlines have been singing the praises of Apple's iOS 12 update. The new operating system is "totally worth downloading"--not only does it come with features that "may improve your life," it's also faster and smarter, according to Christina Bonnington's summary here in Slate. It's also said to be more of a gossip. According to reports, Siri's latest iteration is a lot more clue-y about the stars, with celebrity trivia among its new tricks (which include shortcuts, calorie-counting support, and the weirdly targeted "motorsports results, schedules, stats and standings"). Siri, it seems, is keeping up with the Kardashians.

Indian actress Priyanka Chopra will invest in dating app Bumble as the service prepares to expand into her native country later this year. She will also act as an adviser to the app - which requires women to make the first move - for its Indian launch. Bumble's expansion comes as firms push to make women feel safe using dating apps in India. The actress becomes the latest in a string of celebrities to take a stake in a tech venture. Bumble said Chopra will become "partner, advisor, and investor" to the tech firm.

Internet giants are getting better at countering fake news. For the most part, though, they screen content on a story-by-story basis and only block entire outlets well after they've done significant damage. Researchers from MIT's CSAIL and Qatar's Computing Research Institute might have a better solution: use AI to measure the quality of the source. Their machine learning algorithm uses collections of existing articles to gauge the accuracy and bias of a given outlet on the assumption that a fake news peddler or spin factory isn't about to change its ways. Rather than focusing on the claims themselves, it studies the language used to express those claims.

Fake news continues to rear its ugly head; in March of this year, half of the U.S. population reported seeing deliberately misleading articles on news websites. A majority of respondents to a recent Edelman survey, meanwhile, said that they couldn't judge the veracity of media reports. And given that fake news has been shown to spread faster than real news, it's no surprise that almost seven in ten people are concerned it might be used as a "weapon." Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute believe they've engineered a partial solution. In a study that'll be presented later this month at the 2018 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference in Brussels, Belgium, they describe an artificially intelligent (AI) system that can determine whether a source is accurate or politically prejudiced.

Last December, the world ushered in a new era of popular music: human and artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration. Musical eras are often defined by their dominant modes of production--analog, electronic, digital--each bringing about new styles and ways of listening. This era is marked by the release of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by the music collaborative Skygge. Skygge, led by composer and producer Benoît Carré and musician and tech researcher François Pachet, translates to "shadow" in Danish and was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name. We now know that algorithms can learn human bias, but can they also create highly creative and emotionally engaging music?