However, the IoT is not a static force, and developers and users are constantly finding news ways to exploit the simple yet powerful concept of connected everything. In 2019, the industry should expect emerging trends to help set the trajectory of the IoT for years or even decades to come. Here are a few to keep an eye on next year. We often get caught up in the excitement of new technology, and low levels of regulation across the tech field mean it's easy to focus almost exclusively on innovation. The IoT, however, has posed a number of concerns, and 2019 will likely see various legislatures and regulatory entities start proposing and enforcing new regulations.

More than 4,400 exhibitors showed off their hardware at CES 2018. That's a lot of gadgets, and the show can become an unmanageable circus if you don't enter with a game plan--and that counts for people following the action at home, as well. To give you a little head start, here's our cheat sheet on what to look for at CES 2019. It's pretty easy to predict what AMD will be revealing at CES--because the company has already told us. AMD chief executive Lisa Su will host a keynote address on Wednesday, Jan. 9 where she'll talk up the company's 2019 plans to "catapult computing, gaming, and visualization technologies forward with the world's first 7nm high-performance CPUs and GPUs."

Imagine saying "Alexa, buy insurance!" You would not even have to specify what type of insurance policy you need, as the artificial intelligence working in the background will already have worked out when your renewals occur, and what your preferences for any given policy would be. These kinds of innovations have already happened in other industries such as online retail. Amazon, for example, can automatically select the best-matched product to your Alexa voice command, while UK online supermarket Ocado offers an automated weekly grocery shop based on customers' tastes and the amount of time it takes them to use their favourite items. However, despite some already functional AI tools such as telematics in motor insurance and wearable fitness technology in life and health, buying an insurance policy on a single voice command is still pretty much science fiction.

Thrive Senior Living is once again challenging norms and industry standards, today announcing plans to integrate conversational artificial intelligence across all of its communities in 2019. The industry disrupter has tapped Aiva Health, a Silicon Valley-based startup, to launch an integrated technology platform designed to transform the way residents interact and build relationships beyond the four walls of their rooms. The comprehensive and personalized system is the first of its kind in the industry to be fully integrated into the work flows of a community. Aiva uses Google Home, Amazon Echo and smart speakers to not only engage and empower Thrive residents, but also to connect them more closely to their caregivers. The voice OS is built on a suite of enterprise applications – a mobile app for caregivers to manage help requests, a dashboard for performance reporting and a backend for controlling the voice assistants' settings and interactions with other IoT smart devices such as TVs, lights and thermostats.

Just in time for the start of the playoffs, the NFL has released a new skill for Amazon Alexa devices. "A Rookie's Guide to the NFL" will guide fans and folks who are new to the game through the 2019 postseason, with information about teams, rules, positions, players, equipment, formations and more. The skill is the NFL's first venture into apps with voice-enabled features and is available through the Alexa Skills Store starting today. To use the Rookie's Guide to the NFL, you'll have to download and enable the skill through your Alexa app. That will make it available through any of your Alexa devices.

On Wednesday morning, a FedEx delivery man knocked on my door. His face bore a broad grin, his hands a svelte cardboard box. I nodded sleepily, and he thrust the box into my hands. "Your new iPhone is here!" he said, still smiling, evidently in anticipation of my own excitement. "Hey, thanks," I said, trying to match his enthusiasm, if only out of reciprocal politeness.

A recommender system is an information filtering technology which can be used to predict preference ratings of items (products, services, movies, etc) and/or to output a ranking of items that are likely to be of interest to the user. Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) learn and predict the tastes and preferences of users by incorporating available contextual information in the recommendation process. One of the major challenges in context-aware recommender systems research is the lack of automatic methods to obtain contextual information for these systems. Considering this scenario, in this paper, we propose to use contextual information from topic hierarchies of the items (web pages) to improve the performance of context-aware recommender systems. The topic hierarchies are constructed by an extension of the LUPI-based Incremental Hierarchical Clustering method that considers three types of information: traditional bag-of-words (technical information), and the combination of named entities (privileged information I) with domain terms (privileged information II). We evaluated the contextual information in four context-aware recommender systems. Different weights were assigned to each type of information. The empirical results demonstrated that topic hierarchies with the combination of the two kinds of privileged information can provide better recommendations.

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According to Yext, nearly 50% of broadband households use voice search and artificial intelligence (AI) search capabilities, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home. It's no secret that, as AI adoption rates are skyrocketing, the impact on today's youth increases as well but, it's actually more helpful than you may have anticipated. You may have guessed this, since…you know, the majority of voice assistants don't have a screen. But for kids, this is a great thing! Unlike other search technology that requires typing, conversational AI provides information without actually staring at a screen.

You studied the Industrial Revolution in your school history classes. If you think back, you'll realize that the technology available during this span of time completely re-framed the way products were created and, in turn, the way people worked and lived. It's hard to imagine a world before industrialization. But the truth is that there was little change in the mechanics of the economy, movement of classes, or technological advancements prior to this time. After the industrial revolution began, though, technology boomed at a rapid pace.