Recommender Systems (RS) [1] are a kind of system that seek to recommend to users what they are likely interested in. Unlike search engines, the users do not need to type any keyword. The RS's will learn their interest automatically. For instance, if the user has just bought a numeric camera, the RS will recommend to him some SD memory cards; if a user watches a lot of action movies, the RS may suggest some other action movies to him. And this is the typical behaviors which we observe universally in Netflix (movies), Youtube (videos), Google Play (apps), Facebook (friends), Amazon (goods) and other platforms today.

In Facebook Messenger, for example, several news organization such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already using bots and some level of automation to deliver news through the platform. Artificial intelligence understands the environment it operates in and performs certain actions as a result of it. AI seeks to learn what its users want and how they want it. In the specific case of news media, articles can be processed through algorithms that analyze readers' locations, social media posts and other publicly available data. They can then be served content tailored to their personality, mood and social economic status, among other things.

They sound cute, but for the second year in a row, politically motivated groups calling themselves the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies have more or less successfully gamed the Hugo Award nominations, some of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction and fantasy. The Chuck Tingle book is one of their recommendations. The puppies oppose diversity initiatives and support lists that are dominated by white men. Their targets, which they call SJW for "social justice warriors," are women, people of color, LGBT writers, editors and artists and the people who support them, including L.A. Times Critic at Large John Scalzi. Rabid Puppies leader Vox Day, a self-described libertarian, has criticized best-selling science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, who is black, as an "ignorant half-savage," writing, "Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males."

It's that time of year: The most prepared of you are carboloading after weeks of training for Marathon Monday, while the least prepared are scrambling to finish your taxes. Either way, surely you'll need some breaks in the pasta and accounting. Should you take your kids to Disney's live-action/CGI remake of its beloved 1967 film "The Jungle Book"? Absolutely, says Ty Burr, who gives three stars to this movie placing "talking animals of almost tactile musculature and movement" in a lush jungle landscape; it holds up right until its overly frenetic final scenes. The jungle beasts are voiced by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, and Scarlett Johanssen, and newcomer Neel Sethi is charming as Mowgli.

The good news: The Loch Ness Monster has been captured on sonar by an underwater robot operated by the British division of Norway's Kongsberg Maritime. The bad news: "Nessie" is a prop from a Sherlock Holmes film that sank in the loch in 1969. The monstrous model was long thought lost until it was discovered this week by the Munin Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) as part of an underwater survey of the loch for The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland. There have been sporadic sightings of what is purported to be the Loch Ness Monster since the first recorded encounter by St Columba in 565 AD. After a supposed photograph was taken in 1933, public interest in some sort of large, dinosaur-like creature making its home in the Highlands skyrocketed, and in the decades since the loch has been subjected to sonar scans, submersible hunts, hydrophone surveys, and enough photographs taken above and below the surface to wallpaper the Grand Canyon.

Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have created a way to realistically colorize black-and-white photos without any human intervention for the first time ever. The team's approach is based on convolutional neural networks -- a type of machine learning originally inspired by the visual cortex of a cat. The researchers used artificial intelligence to classify a full image and then identify parts of that image to label its components before filling them in with the appropriate colors. Previous research efforts in automated colorization fell short of being totally automatic. Most required users to provide a reference image that was similar to the black-and-white image in order to colorize it properly.

Is this the beginning of the end for Apple? The tech giant's inexorable growth has been a given for most of the 21st century but, on Wednesday, Apple reported its first decline in quarterly sales for 13 years: a 13% fall, down to 50bn ( 34bn). That's still enough to reduce the UK's budget deficit by half, but, in Apple's reckoning, it's a catastrophe. Apple's share price fell by 8% yesterday, wiping more than 40bn off its value in a few hours. Is the world falling out of love with the Croesus of Cupertino? Even Siri was sounding like an exhausted spin doctor when we asked it for answers.

The first season of Mr. Robot was a breakout hit for USA last summer, its cyberpunk hacker storyline running in an eerie parallel to real-life events like the Ashley Madison breach. In the time since, there hasn't been much information on where season 2 might go, other than news that creator Sam Esmail is directing all 10 episodes and the plot will tackle that Apple/FBI iPhone decryption debate. Thankfully though, we now have a few more precious nuggets to huddle over in the dark: Collider reports the show will return July 13, and further directs our attention to two teasers that suggest the world-shattering hacking is far from over. The first briefly revisits Elliot (Rami Malek) sitting in his apartment at the end of the season 1 finale when an urgent knock disrupts his focus. The second, which you can find on Entertainment Weekly, checks in on Darlene (Carly Chaikin), Angela (Portia Doubleday), and Tyrell (Martin Wallström) in addition to Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) himself.

Amazon is spreading the Alexa love. The voice service is now available on the Triby. This small, family-focused message board, internet radio and VoIP device is the first device available for purchase not made by Amazon to feature the company's clever voice service. Using the Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS), Invoxia, the maker behind the Triby, built the voice capability into the device. Now with Alexa, the Triby is an even better kitchen device allowing owners to tell it to set timers, play music or read sports scores.

When most people rave about seeing an "electrifying" performance, they typically aren't talking about witnessing real lightning on stage. But for the band ArcAttack, harnessing the power of 1 million volts of electricity -- and turning that energy into music -- is business as usual. ArcAttack creates music using two giant structures called Tesla coils, which were invented by the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla in 1891, as part of his dream to develop a way to transmit electricity around the world without any wires. Now, more than 120 years later, a band that is described by its founding member, Joe DiPrima, as a "mad scientist-slash-rock group," has found an innovative way to use these tower-like structures for entertainment. The band performed Saturday (April 23) here at Smithsonian magazine's "The Future Is Here" festival, a three-day event that explores the intersection of science and science fiction.