In 2018, an estimated 100 million voice-controlled devices were installed in homes worldwide, and the apps that control them, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are getting more powerful, with new skills being added every day. Great voice apps improve how users interact with the web, whether they're checking the weather, asking for sports scores, or playing a game.

His creation of the "Ashley Too" toy is injected with the personality of Miley Cyrus, designed for fans to feel closer to her. With moving eyes, a dancing body and emotive conversations, the toy leaves us questioning how much personality our AI smart devices should have – or whether or not they should have them at all. As robots become more human in their interactions, humans are of course more likely to form a connection with them. However, this episode is merely Charlie Brooker's prediction as to what the future holds. Whilst AI smart devices such as the Amazon Alexa and Google Home assistant are entering our homes, they're not yet necessarily equipped with the ability to detect emotion or respond to questions in an emotive manner. So, does this mean that AI will be limited in its success by its lack of emotional intelligence (EI)?

Is it possible that a mobile app used by seven million people -- and which is adding more than half a million new users per month and has already handled more that 50 million client interactions -- would not be considered a success? Even Christian Kitchell, AI Solutions and Erica Executive at Bank of America declares, "We're only in the first mile of a marathon." Forrester Principal Analyst Peter Wannemacher says Erica's number of interactions is a positive, but doesn't indicate success. He does add, however, that "Erica has been more successful than many industry insiders -- probably even Bank of America itself -- thought it would be." Bank of America's virtual financial assistant (the name is derived from the last part of "America") launched in June 2018.

Recommender Systems are widely and successfully applied in e-commerce. Could they be used for design? In this paper, we introduce Pitako1, a tool that applies the Recommender System concept to assist humans in creative tasks. More specifically, Pitako provides suggestions by taking games designed by humans as inputs, and recommends mechanics and dynamics as outputs. Pitako is implemented as a new system within the mixed-initiative AI-based Game Design Assistant, Cicero. This paper discusses the motivation behind the implementation of Pitako as well as its technical details and presents usage examples. We believe that Pitako can influence the use of recommender systems to help humans in their daily tasks.

Experience Management studies AI systems that automatically adapt interactive experiences such as games to tailor to specific players and to fulfill design goals. Although it has been explored for several decades, existing work in experience management has mostly focused on single-player experiences. This paper is a first attempt at identifying the main challenges to expand EM to multi-player/multi-user games or experiences. We also make connections to related areas where solutions for similar problems have been proposed (especially group recommender systems) and discusses the potential impact and applications of multi-player EM.

AI technologies have the potential to dramatically impact the lives of people with disabilities (PWD). Indeed, improving the lives of PWD is a motivator for many state-of-the-art AI systems, such as automated speech recognition tools that can caption videos for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, or language prediction algorithms that can augment communication for people with speech or cognitive disabilities. However, widely deployed AI systems may not work properly for PWD, or worse, may actively discriminate against them. These considerations regarding fairness in AI for PWD have thus far received little attention. In this position paper, we identify potential areas of concern regarding how several AI technology categories may impact particular disability constituencies if care is not taken in their design, development, and testing. We intend for this risk assessment of how various classes of AI might interact with various classes of disability to provide a roadmap for future research that is needed to gather data, test these hypotheses, and build more inclusive algorithms.

A recommendation engine is a system that suggests products, services, information to users based on analysis of data. Notwithstanding, the recommendation can derive from a variety of factors such as the history of the user and the behaviour of similar users. Recommendation systems are quickly becoming the primary way for users to expose to the whole digital world through the lens of their experiences, behaviours, preferences and interests. And in a world of information density and product overload, a recommendation engine provides an efficient way for companies to provide consumers with personalised information and solutions. A recommendation engine can significantly boost revenues, Click-Through Rates (CTRs), conversions, and other essential metrics.

Recommender Systems are becoming more and more relevant as the amount of information on "The Internets" is exponentially increasing: Finding what you might enjoy from books, movies, games to who to follow on Instagram becomes increasingly difficult. Moreover, we (the users) require faster interactions with the products we use on a daily basis, so we don't feel like we waste time (even though we do it more than ever before in human history). As the amounts of data increase, your computational resources might have a hard time to produce fast enough results. Here, we'll have a look at a succinct implementation of a Recommender System that is both the basis of many real-world implementations and is easy to understand. Traditionally, recommender systems are built around user ratings given for a set of items, e.g.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are two trendy buzzwords in the market right now, and often appear to be utilized interchangeably. They are not fairly the same thing, but the observation is that they many times direct to a little confusion. So I had deliberation to write this piece of a blog to clarify the difference. Both terminologies come into picture when the subject is data analytics, insights, Big Data and the wider ways how technological changes are driving the entire world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the wider concept of machines being able to execute tasks in a way that we would regard it as "smart".

Interactive recommender systems that enable the interactions between users and the recommender system have attracted increasing research attentions. Previous methods mainly focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy. However, they usually ignore the diversity of the recommendation results, thus usually results in unsatisfying user experiences. In this paper, we propose a novel diversified recommendation model, named Diversified Contextual Combinatorial Bandit (DC$^2$B), for interactive recommendation with users' implicit feedback. Specifically, DC$^2$B employs determinantal point process in the recommendation procedure to promote diversity of the recommendation results. To learn the model parameters, a Thompson sampling-type algorithm based on variational Bayesian inference is proposed. In addition, theoretical regret analysis is also provided to guarantee the performance of DC$^2$B. Extensive experiments on real datasets are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.