Sonos and Ikea have teamed up to release a line of connected speakers that include a table lamp and a bookshelf. Both devices connect to the WiFi, can be controlled by an app and let users play music from their favorite service like Spotify or Apple Music. The lamp and bookshelf, part of a line called'Symfonisk,' are priced at $179 and $99, respectively, and are expected to become available for purchase in August. Sonos and Ikea have teamed up to release a line of connected speakers that include a table lamp and a bookshelf. While both devices are priced within the same affordable range typically found in Ikea products, they pack the high quality of any other Sonos speaker.

Voice assistants usually only give you brief summaries of the news -- helpful if you're in a hurry, but that's about it. Amazon is betting that you'll want something deeper. It's rolling out an Alexa feature in the US that provides long-form news from Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, Newsy and NPR. Ask Alexa to "tell me the news" or to "play news" from a specific outlet and you'll get detailed audio from all providers, and video from CNBC and Newsy. You can skip stories if you'd rather not examine every story in vivid detail.

If you're not happy with the Wi-Fi router your ISP gave you, there's a great deal today on an affordable and highly rated router. The TP-Link Archer A7 AC1750 Smart WiFi router is $47 on Amazon when you clip the extra $10 off coupon on the product page, located just underneath the sales price. That extra discount makes this price the all-time low for the Archer A7 on Amazon. If the coupon doesn't show up for you, $57 is still a great price for this router, which usually sells for $65 to $70. It's also packed with bandwidth prioritization "quality of service" (QoS) technology to ensure intensive uses like online games and 4K Netflix streams get the best experience possible on your network.

Recommender system research suffers from a disconnect between the size of academic data sets and the scale of industrial production systems. In order to bridge that gap, we propose to generate large-scale user/item interaction data sets by expanding pre-existing public data sets. Our key contribution is a technique that expands user/item incidence matrices matrices to large numbers of rows (users), columns (items), and non-zero values (interactions). The proposed method adapts Kronecker Graph Theory to preserve key higher order statistical properties such as the fat-tailed distribution of user engagements, item popularity, and singular value spectra of user/item interaction matrices. Preserving such properties is key to building large realistic synthetic data sets which in turn can be employed reliably to benchmark recommender systems and the systems employed to train them. We further apply our stochastic expansion algorithm to the binarized MovieLens 20M data set, which comprises 20M interactions between 27K movies and 138K users. The resulting expanded data set has 1.2B ratings, 2.2M users, and 855K items, which can be scaled up or down.

The next time you ask Google Assistant a question, you'll be more likely to get something beyond a flurry of web links. Google is rolling out an update to Assistant on Android that provides more detailed (not to mention more vivid) info cards when you ask certain questions. Search for local events and you'll get cards that include associated visuals and bookmark buttons. Look for cute cats, meanwhile, and you'll see pictures for adorable breeds on top of the actual rankings. Other upgraded searches include stocks (you'll see a stock performance graph), financial calculators, color pickers and even a bubble level.

One of the most common applications of machine learning today is in recommendation algorithms. Netflix and YouTube use them to push you new shows and videos; Google and Facebook use them to rank the content in your search results and news feed. While these algorithms offer a great deal of convenience, they have some undesirable side effects. You've probably heard of them before: filter bubbles and echo chambers. Concern about these effects is not new.

Matrix completion has a long-time history of usage as the core technique of recommender systems. In particular, 1-bit matrix completion, which considers the prediction as a ``Recommended'' or ``Not Recommended'' question, has proved its significance and validity in the field. However, while customers and products aggregate into interacted clusters, state-of-the-art model-based 1-bit recommender systems do not take the consideration of grouping bias. To tackle the gap, this paper introduced Group-Specific 1-bit Matrix Completion (GS1MC) by first-time consolidating group-specific effects into 1-bit recommender systems under the low-rank latent variable framework. Additionally, to empower GS1MC even when grouping information is unobtainable, Cluster Developing Matrix Completion (CDMC) was proposed by integrating the sparse subspace clustering technique into GS1MC. Namely, CDMC allows clustering users/items and to leverage their group effects into matrix completion at the same time. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that GS1MC outperforms the current 1-bit matrix completion methods. Meanwhile, it is compelling that CDMC can successfully capture items' genre features only based on sparse binary user-item interactive data. Notably, GS1MC provides a new insight to incorporate and evaluate the efficacy of clustering methods while CDMC can be served as a new tool to explore unrevealed social behavior or market phenomenon.

"Abstinence ... Animal rights ... Very conservative ... Marijuana OK ... Children should be given guidelines ... Religion guides my life ... Make charitable contributions ... Would initiate hugs if I wasn't so shy ... Enjoy a good argument ... Have to-do lists that seldom get done ... Sweet food, baked goods ... Artificial or missing limbs ... Over 300 pounds ... Drag ... Exploring my orientation ... Women should pay." By the fall of 1994, Gary Kremen was working toward launching the first dating site online, Match.com. There was another four-letter word for love, he knew, and it was data, the stuff he would use to match people. No one had done this, so he had to start from scratch, drawing on instinct and his own dating experience.

Amazon's digital assistant could soon do more than just turn on your lights or tell you the weather. The e-commerce giant has signaled a major leap into healthcare for Alexa, by rolling out an invite-only program for developers to create their own skills around health and medicine. It would allow users to ask Alexa to book a doctor's appointment, find an urgent care center and check for updates on prescription refills. Amazon's digital assistant could soon do more than just turn on your lights or tell you the weather. Amazon, which launched the program on Thursday, said the skills are all compliant with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which ensures that personal health care information is protected. The firm told Wired that it has added extra security levels to how it treats the data collected through these skills, beyond the encryption, access controls and secure cloud storage it deploys for other skill data.

Step aside, Mr Aldrin, because there's a new buzz in town - and it's coming from robot bees that NASA is sending to work on the International Space Station. Dubbed'Astrobees', the cube-shaped robots will fly about the orbiting laboratory, running experiments and helping out the crew by using their attachable manipulator arms. The design of the little bots was inspired by the flying combat remote from Star Wars, which teaches the film's hero Luke Skywalker to fight with a lightsaber. Dubbed'Astrobees', the cube-shaped robots will fly about the orbiting laboratory, running experiments and helping out the crew by using their attachable manipulator arms The design of the little bots was inspired by the flying combat remote from Star Wars, which teaches the film's hero Luke Skywalker to fight with a lightsaber (pictured) The robots were built and developed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where engineers created a mock-up of the interior of the International Space Station where they tested the Astrobees' capabilities. 'There are some things only humans can do in space.