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This AI Learns Your Fashion Sense and Invents Your Next Outfit

MIT Technology Review

Artificial intelligence might just spawn a whole new style trend: call it "predictive fashion." In a paper published on the ArXiv, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Adobe have outlined a way for AI to not only learn a person's style but create computer-generated images of items that match that style. The system could let retailers create personalized pieces of clothing, or could even be used to help predict broader fashion trends. First, the researchers trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn and classify a user's preferences for certain items, using purchase data scraped from Amazon in six categories: shoes, tops, and pants for both women and men. This type of recommender model is common in the online retail world, usually showing up in an "Other items you might like" area at the bottom of a page.


New AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Machine Learning Practitioners

#artificialintelligence

The second, a Base AMI, available in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu versions, provides a high-performance foundational platform for power users to run their own customized deep learning models. The Conda-based AMI comes packaged with latest official releases of the following deep learning frameworks: Apache MXNet 0.12 with Gluon, TensorFlow 1.4, Caffe2 0.8.1, PyTorch 0.2, CNTK 2.2, Theano 0.9, Keras 1.2.2 and Keras 2.0.9. The Base AMI provides the foundation of following GPU drivers and libraries: CUDA 8 and 9, CuBLAS 8 and 9, CuDNN 6 and 7, glibc 2.18, OpenCV 3.2.0, Both of the new AMIs available from the AWS Marketplace include the following libraries and drivers for GPU acceleration on the cloud: CUDA 8 and 9, cuDNN 6 and 7, NCCL 2.0.5 libraries and. To assist with installation of the AMI version that best fits your needs, we have added wizard directly in the AWS console, created a step-by-step guide and provided additional how-to resources in our new documentation site.


Amazon's automated convenience stores edge closer to public debut

Engadget

Last year, Amazon opened its first convenience store embedded with its "just walk out technology." Located in Seattle, the Amazon Go store, which lets shoppers walk in, load up on the items they want and walk out without having to pay for the items in a checkout line, has been testing its technology with Amazon employees. Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company has worked through some of the hangups with the technology and is making moves towards opening its store and others to the public. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that while the Amazon Go store did well with a small amount of customers who were shopping fairly slowly, it couldn't keep up when there were more than 20 shoppers in the store at once. The store uses cameras, sensors and deep learning algorithms to track shoppers as they move around, log which items they take and charge them once they leave. Those technical bugs pushed the public opening of the store from an initial projection of early 2017 to an undetermined future date.


Personalized Customer Experience Increases Revenue And Loyalty

#artificialintelligence

Personalized experiences are a hot topic these days. Certain types of businesses have become very skilled at delivering personalized service. Think about a hotel you've stayed at before that welcomes you back and remembers that you liked a certain type of pillow, a specific newspaper and a corner room. The experience is becoming more and more common, and this type of service is crossing over into many other industries, especially retail. When a customer walks into a retail store, the salesperson has two choices: simply ring up a purchase, or truly help the customer get what he or she really needs.


Alibaba's AI Fashion Consultant Helps Achieve Record-Setting Sales

MIT Technology Review

On the third floor of a shopping mall in the heart of Shanghai last week, Xiaolan He, a woman in her 50s, took an olive-green down jacket to a fitting room. To her surprise, she found a screen about the size of a large poster on the wall. It recognized the item of clothing in her hands through a tiny sensor embedded in the garment, and showed several options for matching items that she could flip through like a photo album. The screen, and the system that powers it, make up FashionAI--which essentially became He's personal stylist. FashionAI received its first big wave of customers on Saturday during Singles' Day, a Chinese shopping festival started by Alibaba in 2009 and held on November 11 each year.


Indigo Books & Music Case Study Ideal AI for Retail Recruiting

#artificialintelligence

"Both the cost and time savings were immediately recognizable." Indigo, "the world's first cultural department store for book lovers," is an adored and well-respected brand. As part of Indigo's corporate identity, they take pride in an elevated employee experience. Repeatedly ranked among the top 10 in Top Retail Employer Brand lists, it is no surprise that Indigo is flooded with over 2200 online applications every single week. Indigo approached Ideal as their number of applications continued to climb.


Children's smart toys have 'worrying security failures'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A child safety warning has been issued over'smart' toys that can be hacked via their Bluetooth connections. The security loophole means that it is possible for strangers to connect to the toys and talk to children without their parents' knowledge. Consumer group Which? said an investigation found'worrying security failures' with the I-Que Intelligent Robot, Furby Connect, Toy-fi Teddy, and CloudPets cuddly toy. It has written to retailers asking them to stop selling the toys ahead of Christmas until the security problems have been resolved. A child safety warning has been issued over'smart' toys that can be hacked via their Bluetooth connections.


Alibaba's FashionAI shows how machine learning might save the mall

#artificialintelligence

Alibaba's sales from Saturday's Singles Day event exceeded 25 billion dollars, more than quadruple what Americans spent last year during Black Friday. While the majority of those sales undoubtedly came via online purchases, the company also quietly experimented with an AI-powered project designed to woo offline shoppers. FashionAI was developed by Alibaba researchers in order to provide a recognizable interface for customers to use while trying on clothes. It's a basic screen interface that uses machine-learning to make clothing and accessory suggestions to customers based on the items they are trying on. There's no camera; it uses information embedded in the item's tag to make the recommendations.


How Deep Learning Will Alter the Retail Space

@machinelearnbot

Artificial Intelligence has been a hot word across all industries lately. Think all the fuss around self-driving cars, Google's updated Assistant and the general talks of how conversational interfaces are the future of tech. Around 54 percent of retailers already use or plan to add artificial intelligence technology to their toolkit, with 20 percent planning to introduce some AI within the next 12 months, according to the latest report from SLI Systems. The increased adoption of AI in retail can be specifically attributed to advances in the deep learning. Deep learning is a specific machine learning approach to building and training neural networks.


Alibaba's AI Fashion Consultant Helps It Set a New Singles' Day Record

MIT Technology Review

Alibaba set a new Singles' Day record this Saturday by selling a staggering $25 billion worth of goods. The company also quietly tested a technology that could help it reinvent retail using artificial intelligence. On the third floor of a shopping mall in the heart of Shanghai last week, Xiaolan He, a woman in her 50s, took an olive green, down jacket to a fitting room. To her surprise, she found a screen about the size of a large poster on the wall. It recognized the item of clothing in her hands through a tiny sensor embedded in the garment, and showed several options for matching items that she could flip through like a photo album.