Starting today, Google is allowing Chromecast owners to add the streaming device to speaker groups along with Home speakers. The addition of the dongle to the Home ecosystem will allow you to queue up a song, playlist, podcast or audiobook and have it play in sync across all of the speakers and Chromecast-connected devices in your home. XDA Developers spotted the functionality in Google's Preview program that gives an early look at upcoming features. Google confirmed to Engadget that the capability is starting to roll out to users today. The feature makes good on Google's promise to integrate Chromecast into speaker groups, which can be set up through the Google Home app.

Need another smart speaker to consider for your holiday gift-giving? The LG smart display we spotted at CES is finally ready to go on sale complete with its 8-inch touch screen, Android Things platform with apps for Google Maps, Photos and YouTube plus Google Assistant-powered AI features. LG is touting the speakers and their Meridian Audio technology, which it hopes will make the $300 MSRP easier to swallow among all of that competition. That's more than the $200 8-inch Lenovo Smart Display that also runs Android Things and Google's own $150 Home Hub which does not, not to mention the various other options with Alexa, Siri, Facebook or Cortana onboard. It's even more than the $250 JBL Link View which similarly focuses on audio quality.

An executive working in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, Shourjya Sanyal, PhD, chief executive officer of Think Biosolution, said the rapid aging of the worldwide population is opening the door to the use of AI to help care for people with chronic diseases as health care delivery adapts to increased demands. In an article written for Forbes magazine, he noted the number of people aged 80 years and older will rise from the current 14.5 percent of the U.S. population (65 and older) to more than 20 percent by 2030, with similar patterns seen across most of the rest of the Western world. As a result, health care delivery pathways "need to be readjusted, keeping in mind the prevalence of chronic diseases, comorbidities and polypharmacy requirements of the elderly and geriatric patients." There are also specific diseases related to this age cohort as well, like atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, dementia, and osteoarthritis that require "quick diagnosis and continuous supervision by a professional caregiver." Added to the mix is the growing shortage of physicians and caregivers, Sanyal said.

Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization achieve the state-of-the-art performance among various Collaborative Filtering (CF) approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is the lack of explainability. Extensive efforts have been made in the literature to incorporate explainability into LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be available in practice, or fail to provide easy-to-understand explanations. In this paper, we propose a fast influence analysis method named FIA, which successfully enforces explicit neighbor-style explanations to LFMs with the technique of influence functions stemmed from robust statistics. We first describe how to employ influence functions to LFMs to deliver neighbor-style explanations. Then we develop a novel influence computation algorithm for matrix factorization with high efficiency. We further extend it to the more general neural collaborative filtering and introduce an approximation algorithm to accelerate influence analysis over neural network models. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the correctness, efficiency and usefulness of our proposed method.

Amazon Alexa's repertoire of on-demand music services appears to be growing by the day. Hot on the heels of Tidal's support, Pandora has enabled Premium streaming on Alexa-equipped devices like Amazon's Echo speakers. You no longer have to be content with Pandora's radio feature -- you can access your playlists and play albums like you would anywhere else. You can set the service as your default music option as well. It's not quite complete when Personalized Soundtracks support is "coming soon," but you otherwise won't be hurting for choice.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham takes a look at three new connected speakers that all have video features. Amazon has enlarged and enhanced its Echo Show device, which brings video to its line of smart speaker, Google counters with the Home Hub, adding video to the Home line of speakers, and Facebook is in there as well, with its controversial Portal video speaker. We've taken all for intensive test drives. Which one is for you? The Google speaker, ($149, on sale for $99 during Black Friday sales) is our all-around favorite of the trio because it does more than the others.

Microsoft's deepening relationship with Amazon's Alexa now extends to its stores. WalkingCat and others have noticed that Microsoft is carrying both the new Echo Dot and the regular Echo in its online and retail stores. The company isn't just supporting Alexa, then -- it's encouraging you to buy into Amazon's ecosystem. The addition reflects Cortana's changing role at the company. Where Microsoft originally pitched Cortana as a direct competitor to other mainstream voice assistants, it has shifted the AI helper's focus toward chatbots and behind-the-scene tasks that are more useful to the corporate crowd than home users.

Throughout this paper, we use lower case letters to denote scalars and vectors, and use upper case letters to denote random variablesand matrices. We consider the model change detection problem in the following setting. ABSTRACT Model change detection is studied, in which there are two sets of samples that are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) according to a pre-change probabilistic model with parameter θ,and a post-change model with parameter θ The goal is to detect whether the change in the model is significant, i.e., whether the difference between the prechange parameterand the post-change parameter ‖θ θ The problem is considered in a Neyman-Pearson setting, where the goal is to maximize the probability of detection under a false alarm constraint. Since the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is difficult to compute in this problem, we construct an empirical differencetest (EDT), which approximates the GLRT and has low computational complexity. Moreover, we provide an approximation method to set the threshold of the EDT to meet the false alarm constraint.

This undated image provided by Amazon.com, Inc. shows an Amazon Fire TV Cube. Watch whatever you want, whenever you want. All you have to buy is one little box, and the monthly subscriptions are up to you. After decades of flipping through TV channels, many of us find the promise of internet-based television too miraculous to pass up.

If you don't consider yourself to be tech-savvy, it can be hard to find a good tech gift for the more electronically minded folks in your life, especially since the products themselves are constantly changing. So to figure out which tech gifts and electronics are actually worth the splurge this holiday, I spoke with Ben Arnold, senior director of innovation and trends at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which has produced an annual report on consumer technology holiday purchasing patterns for the last 25 years. According to its research, 66 percent of U.S. adults are planning to purchase a tech product as a gift this year, so to help you buy the actually nice gadgets before everyone else catches on, here are 13 electronics and appliances that are bound to be popular this holiday season. Voice speakers, or smart speakers, have been big sellers over the past couple of holiday seasons, and Arnold's research leads him to believe that they'll be popular once again, "especially since Amazon released several new products a couple of weeks ago." He anticipates that smart displays--"which is a screen with all of the smart-speaker features built into it"--are going to be especially popular, like the newest iteration of the Echo Show.