Neural network based models for collaborative filtering have started to gain attention recently. One branch of research is based on using deep generative models to model user preferences where variational autoencoders were shown to produce state-of-the-art results. However, there are some potentially problematic characteristics of the current variational autoencoder for CF. The first is the too simplistic prior that VAEs incorporate for learning the latent representations of user preference. The other is the model's inability to learn deeper representations with more than one hidden layer for each network. Our goal is to incorporate appropriate techniques to mitigate the aforementioned problems of variational autoencoder CF and further improve the recommendation performance. Our work is the first to apply flexible priors to collaborative filtering and show that simple priors (in original VAEs) may be too restrictive to fully model user preferences and setting a more flexible prior gives significant gains. We experiment with the VampPrior, originally proposed for image generation, to examine the effect of flexible priors in CF. We also show that VampPriors coupled with gating mechanisms outperform SOTA results including the Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering by meaningful margins on 2 popular benchmark datasets (MovieLens & Netflix).

Summary: Contextually intelligent, NLP-based interactive assistants are one of the next big things for AI/ML. The tech is already here from recommendation engines. The need to be more efficient and to become AI-augmented in our decision making is now. Getting the contextual awareness is the hard part. Last week we took the position that from a technical standpoint, 'deeply inclusive and contextually sensitive' AI is one of the two'next big things' in AI.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technological advancement that has revolutionised the global market completely. More and more companies and governments are investing in AI to aim for a better and more technologically driven future. In order to gain knowledge in this field, young individuals have started opting for artificial intelligence courses, which prove to be very helpful. Companies also provide AI training to their employees to increase their skill sets in attempts to improve their business plans. The year 2018 saw many changes in the trends followed in AI.

Despite the progress that many other industries have made, healthcare is likely to be the one market where AI can truly have an impact that goes beyond convenience and positively affects human lives. Today, more than ever, many technology vendors are making significant investments in AI to ensure they are able to offer products and services that can use the technology. Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM and Amazon, to name a few, have all adopted and fully committed to AI and are already providing these services to consumers. Anytime a new technology enters healthcare, there are a number of challenges it faces. Common setbacks of AI in healthcare include a lack of data exchange, regulatory compliance requirements and patient and provider adoption.

Regrettably, many leads are left unexplored due to the reality that Salespeople only have so many hours to spend on each lead before moving their attention elsewhere. Knowing this, some organizations hire Business Development Reps (BDRs) to help manage the influx of leads by evaluating, qualifying and nurturing leads before handing them off to a Salesperson to close. Still, the process isn't perfect since BDRs (much like Salespeople) will naturally cherry-pick leads based on their own assumptions. Not to mention, many businesses do not have BDR teams to leverage.

Police in Florida are investigating whether they have stumbled on a silent witness to a possible murder and are trying to get the truth from "her". Sylvia Galva Crespo, 32, was killed by a spear to the chest at home in Hallandale Beach, Florida, north of Miami, in July, which her husband, Adam Crespo, 43, has portrayed as a mysterious accident. But police believe the Amazon Echo smart speaker devices in the home, known as Alexa because of the common "wake" word used to activate them, may have heard and recorded something relevant during the fatal altercation when the couple argued after a night out, the Sun Sentinel reported. "It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom … may be found on the server maintained by or for Amazon," police wrote in a legal filing. Adam Crespo is charged with second-degree murder.

Welcome to Unofficial JBL Month here at CNET. Through sheer coincidence, I've had deals crop up on the JBL Link 10, JBL Link 500 (still available, by the way) and JBL Boost TV, all within the last 10 days or so. So just to finish off October in style, here's one more: For a limited time, and while supplies last, Daily Steals has the JBL Link 20 portable wireless voice-activated speaker for $59.99. The Link 20 is the big brother to the smaller Link 10 I wrote about last week and offers a similarly dazzling array of features: It's portable, waterproof and wireless times two (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi). It has built-in Google Assistant.

Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, is anticipated to become at least a $65 billion market in the next five years. Currently, it is almost impossible to find an established organisation that is not investing in AI technology. However, it seems like enough attention is not provided to this technology before it is availed to the users. There have been major catastrophes encountered due to the failure of AI, and this has made tech leaders legitimately worried about it. This article is little on the negative side, but necessary.

"Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on." We live in an age of Artificial Intelligence, the time when cutting edge technologies reinvent human experience.

Samsung's Bixby assistant won't be the reason you buy (or don't buy) your next Samsung-manufactured smartphone, smart refrigerator, smart router, or smart speaker. And Samsung is finally coming to terms with that. This was the implicit thread underlying the 2019 Samsung Developer Conference (SDC), which kicked off in earnest on Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center. Unlike last year, when Samsung announced new languages for Bixby (German, French, Italian, and Spanish), plus Bixby Marketplace for third-party voice apps, this year's enhancements were on the whole understated. Bixby Templates and Bixby Views make it easier for developers to create capsules (apps, in Samsung's vernacular) across a range of devices, while Natural Language Categories enable Bixby to recommend apps by context instead of name. But two keynotes came and went without so much as a mention of the Galaxy Home, a Bixby-powered smart speaker that Samsung announced last August alongside the Galaxy Note9.