The creative process will be democratized by artificial intelligence. All of Sud's workshop hypotheticals were based on analysis of where tech trends …

Recommender systems have been widely adopted by electronic commerce and entertainment industries for individualized prediction and recommendation, which benefit consumers and improve business intelligence. In this article, we propose an innovative method, namely the recommendation engine of multilayers (REM), for tensor recommender systems. The proposed method utilizes the structure of a tensor response to integrate information from multiple modes, and creates an additional layer of nested latent factors to accommodate between-subjects dependency. One major advantage is that the proposed method is able to address the "cold-start" issue in the absence of information from new customers, new products or new contexts. Specifically, it provides more effective recommendations through sub-group information. To achieve scalable computation, we develop a new algorithm for the proposed method, which incorporates a maximum block improvement strategy into the cyclic blockwise-coordinate-descent algorithm. In theory, we investigate both algorithmic properties for global and local convergence, along with the asymptotic consistency of estimated parameters. Finally, the proposed method is applied in simulations and IRI marketing data with 116 million observations of product sales. Numerical studies demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing competitors in the literature.

We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language generation and retrieval models, including template-based models, bag-of-words models, sequence-to-sequence neural network and latent variable neural network models. By applying reinforcement learning to crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it performed significantly better than many competing systems. Due to its machine learning architecture, the system is likely to improve with additional data.

Six years after reporting its biggest-ever loss, Sony is no longer a conglomerate in freefall. Last week the Japanese group behind the Bravia TV set, the PlayStation, Beyoncé and the Spider-Man films said it was on track to set a new annual profit record – expecting to beat its previous corporate best of ¥526bn (£3.5bn) by 20%. It has been a long journey for the group after years of underperformance and missed targets, including most recently a £800m writedown of its Sony Pictures film division. But at last week's quarterly results update, the company stated that the film unit was one of the company's strongest performers and would help it beat the record profits it made in 1997-98: the year it released Men in Black, and when Steve Jobs had yet to release the Walkman-killing iPod. Now, Sony is expected to make full-year profits of £4.2bn.

Every day, the towering full-scale Unicorn Gundam statue in Tokyo's Odaiba waterfront district undergoes a transformation, eliciting shouts of joy from visitors young and old, many trying to snap good photos with their smartphones. The 19.7-meter, 49-ton statue of a mobile robot from the popular Gundam series has been standing in the Diver City Tokyo commercial plaza since Sept. 24. It replaced a previous model as part of the Tokyo Gundam Project 2017, in which the statue represents the future of Tokyo and helps invigorate the bay area. At night, a special short movie runs every 30 minutes from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. In the Diver City Tokyo Plaza building just behind the gigantic statue, there is a venue called the Gundam Base Tokyo, a mecca for fans of plastic models.

Robot" and "Good Girls Revolt" and films like this year's "Stronger," Shaw is now both the face of and the creative force behind a premium cable show. "She's very much the same as when I met her all those years ago," Dieckmann says by phone.

The Kusama show at the Broad is raising the crowds (if not our critic's inspiration). Los Angeles just had a Philip Glass moment. There's been an architectural furor over possible changes to a work by Philip Johnson. Yayoi Kusama's exhibition of Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad is the hot museum show in L.A. right now. But Times art critic Christopher Knight says if you didn't score a ticket, you're not missing much.

In an odd turn for retail cooperation, Best Buy is now available on Alexa, Amazon's voice-powered digital assistant. Starting today, you can learn about and order Best Buy's Deal of the Day sales just by saying, "Alexa, talk to Best Buy." Sure, it seems odd to have a competing service on Amazon's own devices, but as the blog post from Best Buy points out, the big box store has been selling Amazon Alexa devices in a special section in about 700 of its stores earlier this year. Best Buy is only the latest retailer to jump on the voice-shopping trend, too. This isn't the first time Amazon has allowed a competitor into its garden, either. Spotify and Pandora live easily next to Amazon's own music service on its connected smart speakers, as do competing on-demand video services.

Gift-giving season shouldn't be confined to Christmas and birthdays, especially with tech as cool as this. Give your nose a reason to get out of bed with Sensorwake's olfactory alarm clock, which emits aromatic perfume such as Seaside, Peppermint and Toast to start your day on the right note. The HomePod is Apple's answer to the virtual home assistant trend, but the highlight here is the sound quality. Built-in spatial awareness helps the HomePod cater to the acoustics of the room. This one's for the friend who's always asking, "Have you seen my keys?"

"We are in an AI revolution," according to James Barratt, documentary filmmaker and author. "AI of course has gone through a number of false springs, but this one seems to have a lot more traction." TechRepublic's Dan Patterson met with Barratt to discuss where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed, and how businesses can take advantage. AI previously was used to enter data, and get back an answer, he said. Now, AI will learn about its users and what they are doing.