Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities. Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as word2vec, was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding. Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space. The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.

The cute spherical BB-8 was one of the many highlights of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Spin Master's near life-size replica of him was one of our favorite things about last year's Toy Fair. Unfortunately, 2016 came and went without seeing the adorable robotic companion on the silver screen -- or this particular toy on store shelves. That looks to change later this year with the announced release of the $230 Hero Droid BB-8, just in time for the bot's appearance in the next episode of the Star Wars saga. On the surface, BB-8 appears to be the same droid from last year, with a plastic build modeled after its cinematic counterpart, even down to the traces of wear and tear. It's composed of two distinct pieces -- a round ball of a body and a half-sphere head.

Last year computer scientists unveiled the first song to be composed by artificial intelligence, the Beatles-esque ditty'Daddy's Car'. But it's not the first sign of AI infiltrating music-making – from self-generating soundtracks to unique albums created on demand, the robots are on the march. Jack Needham asks if we're ready for the AI revolution to reach our ears. When we think of the early relationship between humans, machines and music, we might think of Kraftwerk's analog pop or Delia Derbyshire's Radiophonic soundscapes – yet our fascination with machine music goes back much further than that. Late last year, University of Canterbury professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long restored the first piece of recorded machine music created in 1951 by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and artificial intelligence pioneer. The single-sided 12" acetate disc captures three melodies played by a primitive computer that filled most of the ground floor of Turing's laboratory.

"This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

There is an urgent need to expand the AI epistemic community beyond the specific geographies in which it is currently clustered. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the subject of science fiction and is profoundly transforming our daily lives. While computers have already been mimicking human intelligence for some decades now using logic and if-then kind of rules, massive increases in computational power are now facilitating the creation of'deep learning' machines i.e. algorithms that permit software to train itself to recognise patterns and perform tasks, like speech and image recognition, through exposure to vast amounts of data. These deep learning algorithms are everywhere, shaping our preferences and behaviour. Facebook uses a set of algorithms to tailor what news stories an individual user sees and in what order.

Facebook's news feed has recently been taken to task for the explosion of "fake news" that can have real consequences. Music curation has moved from record labels and radio stations to increasingly AI-based algorithms. We are all accustomed to this intrusion of machine intelligence into our lives over the past decade -- systems watching our behavior and trying to infer what we want, and then combining such information with that from other sources so as to create a complex consumer profile that is valuable to advertisers. What happens when the next generation of intelligent systems mediate our environments completely? Or, more to the point, what happens when we delegate the curation of all aspects of our lives, as well as the actual physical appearance of the world, to a pervasive network that learns about us and continually adapts to our needs and desires?

If you have a Google Analytics account, test it out free here. By 2018, Gartner predicts that 20 percent of all business content will be authored by machines. I wanted to find out more about Quill, so I reached out to Narrative Science, the company that makes the solution. Narrative Science helps enterprises use natural language generation to analyze and tell stories from their data. "We hear all the time that content is king--but what's really helping many of our customers is that AI can help automate a lot of high-quality content at scale," Katy De Leon, Narrative Science's VP of marketing, told me via a Skype interview.

Top scientists and theoreticians are expressing their concerns about how badly wrong human experimentation with highly advanced artificial intelligence programs could turn out. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is one of the most prominent scientists to express his disquiet about the potential of the technology, describing artificial intelligence "the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity". In the best case scenario, this technology could improve the world in unimaginable ways. But in the worst case scenario, super-intelligent robots capable of thinking for themselves could effectively take over as this planet's most dominant'species', something which might pose an existential threat to humanity itself. While the worst case scenario might seem like the stuff of science-fiction dystopic fantasy, Google's new DeepMind AI system might suggest that this terrifying story might well become a reality.

Writing content can be a headache for website managers. Producing it takes time, skilled manpower and money. In the current digital reality, brands, companies and small to midsize business owners must have a website in order to maintain contact with clients and attract new ones. In addition, they need to have an email distribution list and profiles on social networks. There are currently over one billion content websites across the globe.

The face of the internet is changing on a swift pace making it easier and more convenient for users to interact with them. Artificial Intelligence is being integrated into websites which is making things simpler with minimal amount of interaction from the user. There are millions of images in a stock photography agency. The way images are distinguished from each other is by keywords relevant to the image. Thanks to the Keywordsready.com, the task has been made pretty simple by fusing together a website that uses Artificial Intelligence to grab the right keywords for you.