In May last year, emoji was named as the world's fastest growing language. In May last year, emoji was named as the world's fastest growing language. IS EMOJI THE FASTEST GROWING LANGUAGE? 'Most people have no idea they can just type a bunch of hearts in their address bar and go to a domain,' the company said. It has been possible to register domain names made up of emojis for a while now.

Most generative models for clustering implicitly assume that the number of data points in each cluster grows linearly with the total number of data points. Finite mixture models, Dirichlet process mixture models, and Pitman--Yor process mixture models make this assumption, as do all other infinitely exchangeable clustering models. However, for some applications, this assumption is inappropriate. For example, when performing entity resolution, the size of each cluster should be unrelated to the size of the data set, and each cluster should contain a negligible fraction of the total number of data points. These applications require models that yield clusters whose sizes grow sublinearly with the size of the data set. We address this requirement by defining the microclustering property and introducing a new class of models that can exhibit this property. We compare models within this class to two commonly used clustering models using four entity-resolution data sets.

This year, we've watched Apple, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft, and many other tech giants make acquisitions or launch products to get into the bot business. They're building bot ecosystems around their chat app platforms -- in SMS, web pages, and elsewhere -- but they're still facing one of the biggest problems in this age of artificial intelligence: How do you find the very best bots? Microsoft wants to expand its bot directory, Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, told VentureBeat in an interview Wednesday, and the company wants to do it with the help of developers and other chat app platforms. "My hope is that we can do something more like search does with web pages, rather than a very closed directory that just Microsoft owns, and we kind of lean that way anyway because we support all these channels," Cheng said. No prospective launch date has been set for an expanded Microsoft bot directory, but Cheng said Microsoft wants to work with the bot developer community and other platforms to create a directory that includes names like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Slack -- some of the biggest chat app platforms in the world.

Ebay this morning launched a new site, dedicated to shopping for furniture and other items for the home. Called eBay Collective, the site also takes advantage of technology from the company's recently announced acquisition of visual search engine Corrigon, which it bought for under 30 million. On eBay Collective, the technology has been integrated to power a "Shop the Room" feature which lets online shoppers hover over an image of a fully designed space, and then the tool will search across eBay inventory to surface items that are close matches to that portion of the image. Corrigon, which had been around since 2008, had developed a way to search and identify objects within an image, then match that with other images or links to products. In a larger photo, you can hover over a specific portion of the image and Corrigon's tech can see the object in that section, then match it with others.

Salience 6.2 also includes improvements in email processing, enabling systems to ingest email databases while stripping out headers and footers, eliminating duplicate emails, and analyzing email threads. Also included is improved named entity recognition, combining machine learning and known lists of people, places, and things. With these improvements, Lexalytics has increased its precision and recall scores, known as F1 scores, by up to 25 percent. The product has also been upgraded to better recognize people and place names from much of Asia, particularly China, Japan, and Korea. This follows Lexalytics's strong growth in that part of the world.

Fisher plays a recently divorced mother of two teens and out-of-work art critic determined to cook a traditional festive dinner with all the trimmings in her sunny Southern California home for her smartphone-addicted friends and extended family. But taming the turkey proves to be the least of her challenges when her neighborhood's cell reception suddenly goes dead, which proceeds to bring out the worst in some already less than exemplary behavior from her preoccupied houseguests. Unfortunately many viewers will have experienced their own connectivity issues long before those characters do. Although there's a genuinely cozy rapport between Fisher and Stevens, the other cast members, including Daphne Zuniga, Nick Court, Natasha Gregson Wagner and Michael Muhney, have a tougher time trying to make all the overwritten, self-consciously quirky dialogue believably their own. Filmmaker Russell Brown clearly had something pertinent he wished to say about our plugged-in, tuned-out obsession with the Internet and was obviously going for a Luis Buñuel-Robert Altman style of social commentary here.

Baidu, a China-based search engine business, took the wraps off a digital health tool to field medical queries and conversations between physicians and their patients called Melody medical assistant. The company claimed in a news release that the app uses deep learning to help doctors gather information from patients about their medical conditions and help physicians arrive at a diagnosis. To give an idea how the bot is designed to work, a spokeswoman provided an overview, in response to emailed questions. When a patient opens the app to pose a question, Melody asks the patient relevant follow-up questions to clarify information such as the duration, severity, and frequency of symptoms. The questions can also touch on additional symptoms related to the condition, even though the patient may not have mentioned them. The point is to give the doctor a more detailed sense of the patient's condition to decide whether to recommend the patient for an appointment sooner rather than later.

China's biggest search engine -- introduced an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot on Tuesday to connect with patients, field medical questions and suggest diagnoses to doctors. The company is calling the bot -- a new feature of the Baidu Doctor app it launched last year -- Melody the medical assistant. Baidu has developed advanced deep learning and natural language processing technologies to power Melody's artificially intelligent "brain." The bot is designed to be the first port of call for a person feeling sick at home. A patient poses a health query to Melody, which responds in real time with further questions, and compares responses with Baidu's database of medical information.

There are plenty of nerdy things that Google's search engine can do, and the latest is a peach if you're a graphic designer. If you type in "RGB to Hex," you'll be shown a color converter that'll let you pick a shade and get the RBG and Hex values for both. In addition, you can hit the Show Color Values toggle and get a breakdown of the HSV, HSL and CMYK counts for those shades. Yes, it's not the most useful feature in the world, but it'll save you having to open up Photoshop just to get a color value for your web design project.

This is the first book that gives you a complete picture of the complications that arise in building a modern web-scale search engine. You'll discover the seedy underworld of spam, cloaking, and doorway pages. You'll see how MapReduce and other approaches to parallelism allow us to go beyond megabytes and to efficiently manage petabytes.