It is one of the most irritating toys ever made - and has been given a hi-tech makeover. The original Big Mouth Billy Bass infuriated many with its incessant flapping and singing. Now, it can lip sync to anything Alexa says, and even dance along to music. The original Big Mouth Billy Bass infuriated many with its incessant flapping and singing. Now, it can lip sync to anything Alexa says, and even dance along to music.

A new dating app hopes to shield women from some of the awkward and uncomfortable interactions that have become common on dating apps. Pickable lets female users sign up on the app anonymously, without the need to supply photos, their name, location or any other details. Men, meanwhile, create a traditional profile, with a name, photo and bio. Women sign up for the app anonymously, meaning they don't have to provide a name, photo or bio. Women only have to verify their identity.

Footwear retailers are becoming more intelligent -- with artificial intelligence, that is. Independents and department stores can now apply conversational AI technology to all stages of their business using Oracle Digital Assistant, which was integrated with Oracle Retail solutions earlier this month. The Digital Assistant, originally launched in October at Oracle OpenWorld 2018, supports analysts by sourcing important data on demand so that employees can more effectively use their time. Conversational AI is frequently used on the front-end of retail, assisting customers online or aiding employees in-store. Simple chatbots that can answer direct questions are increasingly common across e-commerce platforms.

A tiny white cube that uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor the lives of elderly people who live alone could save thousands of lives, according to its creator. The miiCube, a kind of'Amazon Echo for the elderly', learns people's routines and tracks their movements so it can alert the relevant authorities if something is wrong. The device will also sense if there's a break in routine, such as not getting up at the normal time or not following usual daily routines. Creator Kelvin Summoogum - who set up miiCARE, the firm behind the gadget, in March - got the idea when his grandmother broke her hip at home. He said she spent twelve hours in agony on the floor before anyone knew until a neighbour found her and brought her to the hospital.

It is one of the most irritating toys ever made - and has been given a hi-tech makeover. The original Big Mouth Billy Bass infuriated many with its incessant flapping and singing. Now, it can lip sync to anything Alexa says, and even dance along to music. The original Big Mouth Billy Bass infuriated many with its incessant flapping and singing. Now, it can lip sync to anything Alexa says, and even dance along to music.

Unlike human cognition, narrow A.I. is not conscious or driven by emotion. Rather, narrow A.I. operates within a pre-determined, pre-defined range, even if it appears to be much more sophisticated than that. While these A.I.-based systems are able to communicate with users and answer questions, these machines are nowhere close to having human-like intelligence. According to Arif Khan, V.P. of Marketing at SingularityNET, centrally controlled A.I. projects led by large tech companies have resulted in the creation of narrow data sets, which could be harmful for the future of Artificial Intelligence. Let's say Facebook wants to develop A.I. algorithms.

Inmates aren't allowed to have cellphones behind bars, although thousands are smuggled inside each year. Corrections Director Bryan Stirling has long called illegally obtained cellphones the No. 1 security threat inside his institutions, as they allow inmates the unmonitored ability to communicate and potentially continue their criminal endeavors.

While recommendation systems generally observe user behavior passively, there has been an increased interest in directly querying users to learn their specific preferences. In such settings, considering queries at different levels of granularity to optimize user information acquisition is crucial to efficiently providing a good user experience. In this work, we study the active learning problem with multi-level user preferences within the collective matrix factorization (CMF) framework. CMF jointly captures multi-level user preferences with respect to items and relations between items (e.g., book genre, cuisine type), generally resulting in improved predictions. Motivated by finite-sample analysis of the CMF model, we propose a theoretically optimal active learning strategy based on the Fisher information matrix and use this to derive a realizable approximation algorithm for practical recommendations. Experiments are conducted using both the Yelp dataset directly and an illustrative synthetic dataset in the three settings of personalized active learning, cold-start recommendations, and noisy data -- demonstrating strong improvements over several widely used active learning methods.

Jarvish announced two new smart motorcycle helmets earlier this year -- the Jarvish X and Jarvish X-AR, which offer a plethora of helpful riding features, such as voice activation and support for Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa, a 2k front-facing camera, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, a retractable heads up display in the more expensive model, a lightweight carbon fiber design and hours of battery life. These are, arguably, the smartest helmets on the market. Now, bikers can finally put their money down to get in line to own one themselves -- and for a big discount on regular retail prices. The project is being financed on Kickstarter, with the view to raising funds to recruit more engineers to work on the helmet tech. The campaign has been live for just one day and it's already smashed its target of $50,000, having reached $121,367 at time of writing. Its success is unsurprising, given the deep discounts on offer.

Eerie lifelike social robot Furhat exudes empathy and warmth, encouraging people to open up more than they do to friends, its creator claims. The robot, a three-dimensional bust with a projection of a human-like face, aims to build on our new-found ease talking to voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Furhat does this by persuading people to interact with it as if it were a person, picking up on our cues to strike up a rapport. Yet precisely because it isn't human, and is therefore free from bias, the robot can spur people to engage more honestly, its creator says, making it useful in situations such as screening for health risks where people often lie. Furhat is a social robot created by Stockholm-based startup Furhat Robotics.