VUMC providers who participate in upcoming studies exploring the efficiency of voice recognition software and virtual assistants will use Nuance technology to find information about patient's vital signs, medication lists, problem lists, and general health status. Kumah-Crystal and her team will then compare individual provider's experience using virtual assistants with each provider's experience retrieving information manually. The VUMC team will do a timed task analysis to determine whether providers are able to access and review health data more quickly using either method.

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, BMW today premiered its digital personal assistant for its cars, the aptly named BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant. But you won't have to say "Hey, BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant" to wake it up. You can give it any name you want. The announcement comes only a few weeks after BMW also launched its integration with Amazon's Alexa, but it's worth stressing that these are complementary technologies. BMW's own assistant is all about your car, while its partnerships with Amazon and also Microsoft enables other functions that aren't directly related to your driving experience.

This year's Innovation Zone will highlight the latest innovations from Symphony RetailAI – from AI-enabled personalized marketing and demand forecasting, to virtual store remodeling, next-generation category management and Symphony RetailAI's unique digital analytic assistant, CINDE (Conversational INsights and Decision Engine). A first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence-enabled digital assistant for grocery and hard goods retail that is transforming the way retailers work. CINDE does what is humanly impossible, helping you make more intelligent business decisions at speed and scale, to drive sales, profit and customer loyalty. Comprehensive promotion planning, evaluation, and forecasting allows you to maximize the return on every promotional dollar through optimization with AI technology. Make the most of data and insights to design, collaborate & test concepts for your in-store innovations.

On May 16, via a video link, US President Donald Trump "addressed" a conference in Tianjin from Washington and floored the audience with his almost flawless Chinese. Trump highlighted the big leaps made by artificial intelligence or AI, but what impressed the audience more was the US president's tone - his Chinese intonations, inflections and pitch were near perfect. Well, as it transpired, the voice was not really Trump's, after all, but that of an AI-enabled voice technology developed by iFlytek Co Ltd. And, for the record, unlike his granddaughter, Trump hardly knows any Chinese. The iFlytek technology demonstrated its speech synthesis capability - it can produce an unbelievably human-like voice.

Apple's new iPhones will understandably grab the spotlight at the company's media shindig Wednesday at its Cupertino headquarters. But no less important for iPhone (and iPad) owners who have no intention of dashing off for the latest models, will be the official release of iOS 12. It is the software at the core of these devices that promises to freshen them up with new features and tools, including possibly adding zing to an aging handset, even one as old as the iPhone 5S. That means you should be able to install iOS 12 (which you can do for free) soon after Apple's press event. Just be aware that some of the features arriving with the latest software will require or work better on more recent hardware.

That the modern world is a complex place will not have escaped your notice. We are all dimly, unsettlingly aware that our lives are enmeshed in systems we can't fully comprehend. The last meal you ate probably contained produce grown in another country that was harvested, processed, packaged, shipped, then sold to you. The phone in your hand is the end-product of an even more convoluted chain; one that relies on human labor from mines in Africa, assembly lines in China, and standing desks in San Francisco. Explaining how these systems connect and the effect they have on the world is not an easy task.

AI has been empowering many of the world's top technology solutions. Within e-commerce, AI is being used to make the industry increasingly customer-centric. This can be seen with sales forecasts, product recommendation engines, virtual personal assistants like Siri or Alexa, AI-powered chatbots, automated warehouses, etc. Large e-commerce companies offer catalogs with thousands of products and plenty of options. Customers, however, are becoming increasingly impatient during the buying process figuring out what they want to buy in the shortest possible time.

Recommender system is an important component of many web services to help users locate items that match their interests. Several studies showed that recommender systems are vulnerable to poisoning attacks, in which an attacker injects fake data to a given system such that the system makes recommendations as the attacker desires. However, these poisoning attacks are either agnostic to recommendation algorithms or optimized to recommender systems that are not graph-based. Like association-rule-based and matrix-factorization-based recommender systems, graph-based recommender system is also deployed in practice, e.g., eBay, Huawei App Store. However, how to design optimized poisoning attacks for graph-based recommender systems is still an open problem. In this work, we perform a systematic study on poisoning attacks to graph-based recommender systems. Due to limited resources and to avoid detection, we assume the number of fake users that can be injected into the system is bounded. The key challenge is how to assign rating scores to the fake users such that the target item is recommended to as many normal users as possible. To address the challenge, we formulate the poisoning attacks as an optimization problem, solving which determines the rating scores for the fake users. We also propose techniques to solve the optimization problem. We evaluate our attacks and compare them with existing attacks under white-box (recommendation algorithm and its parameters are known), gray-box (recommendation algorithm is known but its parameters are unknown), and black-box (recommendation algorithm is unknown) settings using two real-world datasets. Our results show that our attack is effective and outperforms existing attacks for graph-based recommender systems. For instance, when 1% fake users are injected, our attack can make a target item recommended to 580 times more normal users in certain scenarios.

Would you let an Artificial Intelligence make decisions on for behalf? With all the talk about AI and calls for its regulation (apparently AI will kill us all someday,) I've been thinking about under what circumstances we might take away the decision making from the machines (call it AI). But still we use them to our advantage (as much as we can) -- that's not as crazy as it sounds, because humanity has been doing that for years already. It's everywhere, and there is no hiding from the fact that it is here to stay. From the incredibly-friendly voice of Apple's personal assistant, Siri, to movies like Ex-Machina, Al has always excited me more than anything else.

"AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than electricity or fire…We have learned to harness fire for the benefits of humanity but we had to overcome its downsides too.….AI is really important, but we have to be concerned about it." While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google's search algorithms to IBM's Watson, to autonomous weapons. Everyone is excited about AI, and everyone has a view on AI. AI is no longer the preserve of an Alex Garland screenplay, it's a reality and being used in multiple ways.