You now have access to a treasure trove of government info through your smart speaker if you live in the UK. The British government has made over 12,000 pieces of Gov.uk information available through Alexa and Google Assistant, saving you the trouble of wading through official pages. Some of them are simple questions like the next bank holiday, while others are more involved questions such as obtaining a passport. Not everything is available, so you can't completely depend on a voice assistant just yet. However, there are promises of expansion.

Remember last week when Samsung unveiled its "foldable" phone? Well, it appears there are still a few wrinkles to iron out. Meanwhile, Google walkout organizers say they're facing retaliation from the company, a new Game of Thrones episode has come, and John Legend is putting Siri to shame. Here's the news you need to know in two minutes or less. Two Google employees who worked to organize a walkout of thousands of employees last November say the company is now retaliating against them.

Facebook has confirmed a report from earlier today saying it's working on an artificial intelligence-based digital voice assistant in the vein of Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. The news, first reported by CNBC, indicates Facebook isn't giving up on a vision it first put out years ago, when it began developing an AI assistant for its Messenger platform simply called M. This time around, however, Facebook says it is focusing less on messaging and more on platforms in which hands-free interaction, via voice control and potentially gesture control, is paramount. "We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products," a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge today, following the initial report. That means Facebook may not position the product as a competitor to Alexa or similar platforms, but as more of a feature exclusive to its growing family of hardware devices. CNBC reported that the team building the assistant is working out of Redmond, Washington under the direction of Ira Snyder, a general manager at Facebook Reality Labs and a director of augmented and virtual reality at the company.

The inevitable march toward automation continues, analysts from the McKinsey Global Institute and from Tata Communications wrote in separate reports this week. Artificial intelligence's growth comes as no surprise -- a survey from Narrative Science and the National Business Research Institute conducted earlier this year found that 61 percent of businesses implemented AI in 2017, up from 38 percent in 2016 -- but this week's findings lay out in detail the likely socioeconomic impacts in the coming decade. The McKinsey models predict that 70 percent of companies will adopt at least one form of AI -- whether computer vision, natural language, virtual assistants, robotic process automation, or advanced machine learning -- by 2020. And Tata found unbridled enthusiasm among business leaders for an AI-dominated future; in a survey of 120 of them, 90 percent said they expect AI to enhance decision-making. McKinsey and Tata both contend that's a good thing.

The inevitable march toward automation continues, analysts from the McKinsey Global Institute and from Tata Communications wrote in separate reports this week. Artificial intelligence's growth comes as no surprise -- a survey from Narrative Science and the National Business Research Institute conducted earlier this year found that 61 percent of businesses implemented AI in 2017, up from 38 percent in 2016 -- but this week's findings lay out in detail the likely socioeconomic impacts in the coming decade. The McKinsey models predict that 70 percent of companies will adopt at least one form of AI -- whether computer vision, natural language, virtual assistants, robotic process automation, or advanced machine learning -- by 2020. And Tata found unbridled enthusiasm among business leaders for an AI-dominated future; in a survey of 120 of them, 90 percent said they expect AI to enhance decision-making. McKinsey and Tata both contend that's a good thing.

Beacon is unlike any other member of staff at Staffordshire University. It is available 24/7 to answer students' questions, and deals with a number of queries every day – mostly the same ones over and over again – but always stays incredibly patient. That patience is perhaps what gives it away: Beacon is an artificial intelligence (AI) education tool, and the first digital assistant of its kind to be operating at a UK university. Staffordshire developed Beacon with cloud service provider ANS and launched it in January this year. The chatbot, which can be downloaded in a mobile app, enhances the student experience by answering timetable questions and suggesting societies to join.

Most of the existing recommender systems use the ratings provided by users on individual items. An additional source of preference information is to use the ratings that users provide on sets of items. The advantages of using preferences on sets are two-fold. First, a rating provided on a set conveys some preference information about each of the set's items, which allows us to acquire a user's preferences for more items that the number of ratings that the user provided. Second, due to privacy concerns, users may not be willing to reveal their preferences on individual items explicitly but may be willing to provide a single rating to a set of items, since it provides some level of information hiding. This paper investigates two questions related to using set-level ratings in recommender systems. First, how users' item-level ratings relate to their set-level ratings. Second, how collaborative filtering-based models for item-level rating prediction can take advantage of such set-level ratings. We have collected set-level ratings from active users of Movielens on sets of movies that they have rated in the past. Our analysis of these ratings shows that though the majority of the users provide the average of the ratings on a set's constituent items as the rating on the set, there exists a significant number of users that tend to consistently either under- or over-rate the sets. We have developed collaborative filtering-based methods to explicitly model these user behaviors that can be used to recommend items to users. Experiments on real data and on synthetic data that resembles the under- or over-rating behavior in the real data, demonstrate that these models can recover the overall characteristics of the underlying data and predict the user's ratings on individual items.

Recommender systems are widely used to recommend the most appealing items to users. These recommendations can be generated by applying collaborative filtering methods. The low-rank matrix completion method is the state-of-the-art collaborative filtering method. In this work, we show that the skewed distribution of ratings in the user-item rating matrix of real-world datasets affects the accuracy of matrix-completion-based approaches. Also, we show that the number of ratings that an item or a user has positively correlates with the ability of low-rank matrix-completion-based approaches to predict the ratings for the item or the user accurately. Furthermore, we use these insights to develop four matrix completion-based approaches, i.e., Frequency Adaptive Rating Prediction (FARP), Truncated Matrix Factorization (TMF), Truncated Matrix Factorization with Dropout (TMF + Dropout) and Inverse Frequency Weighted Matrix Factorization (IFWMF), that outperforms traditional matrix-completion-based approaches for the users and the items with few ratings in the user-item rating matrix.

Recommending new items to existing users has remained a challenging problem due to absence of user's past preferences for these items. The user personalized non-collaborative methods based on item features can be used to address this item cold-start problem. These methods rely on similarities between the target item and user's previous preferred items. While computing similarities based on item features, these methods overlook the interactions among the features of the items and consider them independently. Modeling interactions among features can be helpful as some features, when considered together, provide a stronger signal on the relevance of an item when compared to case where features are considered independently. To address this important issue, in this work we introduce the Feature-based factorized Bilinear Similarity Model (FBSM), which learns factorized bilinear similarity model for TOP-n recommendation of new items, given the information about items preferred by users in past as well as the features of these items. We carry out extensive empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets, and we find that the proposed FBSM approach improves upon traditional non-collaborative methods in terms of recommendation performance. Moreover, the proposed approach also learns insightful interactions among item features from data, which lead to deep understanding on how these interactions contribute to personalized recommendation.

In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fashion and for which he/she is well-prepared for so as to get a good grade in. To this end, we propose two different grade-aware course recommendation approaches to recommend to each student his/her optimal set of courses. The first approach ranks the courses by using an objective function that differentiates between courses that are expected to increase or decrease a student's GPA. The second approach combines the grades predicted by grade prediction methods with the rankings produced by course recommendation methods to improve the final course rankings. To obtain the course rankings in the first approach, we adapt two widely-used representation learning techniques to learn the optimal temporal ordering between courses. Our experiments on a large dataset obtained from the University of Minnesota that includes students from 23 different majors show that the grade-aware course recommendation methods can do better on recommending more courses in which the students are expected to perform well and recommending fewer courses in which they are expected not to perform well in than grade-unaware course recommendation methods.