The Reco Algorithms Team is hiring a Principal Research Engineer.

Today, with Digitization of everything, 80 percent the data being created is unstructured. Audio, Video, our social footprints, the data generated from conversations between customer service reps, tons of legal document's texts processed in financial sectors are examples of unstructured data stored in Big Data. Organizations are turning to natural language processing (NLP) technology to derive understanding from the myriad of these unstructured data available online and in call-logs. Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of computers to understand human speech as it is spoken. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that has many important implications on the ways that computers and humans interact.

If you've been eyeing a new gadget for your home, you may have noticed a curious trend. While much of the tech world is still made of glass, aluminum, plastic, and composites, a number of companies are opting for a softer material to outfit their electronics: cloth. Textiles are emerging as a fun, stylish, and irreverent way to accessorize and protect the tech we use in our homes each day. We saw a few examples among the smorgasbord of products Amazon announced at its surprise hardware event in Seattle last month. The Echo Dot and Echo Plus each got a cloth-covered refresh.

Whether you observe Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day, this is a weekend with a few extra tech and gaming sales. We've highlighted some discounts for tech we really like. We've tested many of these items, and the rest look like they're well worth your hard-earned money. New Fire TV Stick 4K for $50 (Was $70). We haven't yet tested the latest Fire TV, but it doesn't appear to pack a lot of surprises.

In recent years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be highly effective in both standard collaborative filtering applications and extensions such as incorporation of implicit feedback. We extend VAEs to collaborative filtering with side information, for instance when ratings are combined with explicit text feedback from the user. Instead of using a user-agnostic standard Gaussian prior, we incorporate user-dependent priors in the latent VAE space to encode users' preferences as functions of the review text. Taking into account both the rating and the text information to represent users in this multimodal latent space is promising to improve recommendation quality. Our proposed model is shown to outperform the existing VAE models for collaborative filtering (up to 29.41% relative improvement in ranking metric) along with other baselines that incorporate both user ratings and text for item recommendation.

The machines haven't taken over. However, they are seeping their way into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves. From voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, to more underlying and fundamental technologies such as behavioral algorithms, suggestive searches and autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles boasting powerful predictive capabilities, there are several examples and applications of artificial intellgience in use today. However, the technology is still in its infancy. What many companies are calling A.I. today, aren't necessarily so.

"Alexa, what's the weather going to be like today." It's taken decades for scientists to understand natural human speech to the point where voice-activated interfaces such as Alexa, the natural language processing system by Amazon, are sufficiently enabled to be successfully accepted by consumers. Alexa is who talks to users of Amazon's Echo products including the Echo, Dot and Tap, as well as Amazon Fire TV and other third-party products. Even since 2012, when the patent was filed for what would ultimately become Amazon's artificial intelligence system Alexa, there has been tremendous growth in capabilities and the credit for that growth goes to machine learning. For something that we do every day without giving it any thought, conversation between machines and humans is complex.

As technology has continued to accelerate in recent decades, workers throughout many industries have faced an increasingly real threat of having their positions become obsolete, be it due to changing economic forces or new innovations that allow employers to replace them with automated processes. One recent innovation has been that of voice-activated hardware and software, specifically thinking of platforms such as Amazon's Alexa. Tech experts have said that this platform has spread rapidly, so much so that they expect it to become an even larger part of the way we interface with all things digital in the coming years. Even now in the early phase of this latest tech progression, some in the hospitality sector have embraced tech like Amazon's Alexa (or other products similar to it) in order to serve their guests. As a result of this, some hotel staff members have begun to worry that Amazon Alexa and other voice-activated platforms could soon replace them, greeting and attending to guests at the front desk the way humans generally do now.

The machines haven't taken over. However, they are seeping their way into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves. From voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, to more underlying and fundamental technologies such as behavioral algorithms, suggestive searches and autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles boasting powerful predictive capabilities, there are several examples and applications of artificial intellgience in use today. However, the technology is still in its infancy. What many companies are calling A.I. today, aren't necessarily so.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has cast doubt on the potential of AI to topple humanity, saying the technology still has a long way to go in terms of development. "What would it take for machines to really take over? Every machine would have to talk to every other machine...It isn't going to happen," he declared. "The technology all of us create is always to make things happen better," he added, "there are a lot of things that are changing in society so drastically, but everything we call artificial intelligence can do...it all helps us humans have a better life, and every one of us appreciates our machines." Wozniak played down the fears of figures such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, all of whom have expressed fears about the possible effects of AI. "Sometimes what we call AI is just the state of the art of what computers can do right now, he said. "If you go back in time, machines have always made humans more powerful...that's what technology is about, we're always trying to improve what humans can do, and how much we can get done, so that we'll have enough time to only work four days a week." One system that did get Wozniak's praise was Siri, the personal assistant app that was acquired by Apple and is now an iconic part of the iPhone. Woz recalled the first time he ever used the service, back when it was still a third-party application, and how it changed my life forever" "It was like we're talking to a friend - it's like a step up, we're getting closer to humanity," he said.