Apple's AirPods have been staggeringly successful. Although at first some found them strange-looking or were convinced they would fall out of their ears, they quickly became the in-ear wireless headphone to aspire to. Rarely in the two years and three months since launch has demand eased off. As a result, the look has gone from curious to acceptable to – dare I say it – iconic. Now, the second-generation AirPods have been announced, I talked to Greg Joswiak, Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing and Kate Bergeron, Vice President of Hardware Engineering about the new arrivals.

The recommender system is an important form of intelligent application, which assists users to alleviate from information redundancy. Among the metrics used to evaluate a recommender system, the metric of conversion has become more and more important. The majority of existing recommender systems perform poorly on the metric of conversion due to its extremely sparse feedback signal. To tackle this challenge, we propose a deep hierarchical reinforcement learning based recommendation framework, which consists of two components, i.e., high-level agent and low-level agent. The high-level agent catches long-term sparse conversion signals, and automatically sets abstract goals for low-level agent, while the low-level agent follows the abstract goals and interacts with real-time environment. To solve the inherent problem in hierarchical reinforcement learning, we propose a novel deep hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm via multi-goals abstraction (HRL-MG). Our proposed algorithm contains three characteristics: 1) the high-level agent generates multiple goals to guide the low-level agent in different stages, which reduces the difficulty of approaching high-level goals; 2) different goals share the same state encoder parameters, which increases the update frequency of the high-level agent and thus accelerates the convergence of our proposed algorithm; 3) an appreciate benefit assignment function is designed to allocate rewards in each goal so as to coordinate different goals in a consistent direction. We evaluate our proposed algorithm based on a real-world e-commerce dataset and validate its effectiveness.

With some new and improved features. The second generation of AirPods have finally arrived. Following a hardware update cycle that saw new iPads on Monday and refreshed iMacs on Tuesday, Apple released the long-awaited update to AirPods Wednesday. Keeping the same name and largely same design as the original AirPods first released in 2016, the new earbuds start at $199 and come with a new wireless charging case, the ability to wirelessly summon Siri and Apple's new H1 chip which promises to add an extra hour of talk time. The wireless charging case, which has a little light on the front to indicate when it is charging, uses the same Qi-standard found on recent iPhones and Android devices.

For most people who talk to our technology -- whether it's Amazon's Alexa, Apple Siri or the Google Assistant -- the voice that talks back sounds female. Some people do choose to hear a male voice. Now, researchers have unveiled a new gender-neutral option: Q. "One of our big goals with Q was to contribute to a global conversation about gender, and about gender and technology and ethics, and how to be inclusive for people that identify in all sorts of different ways," says Julie Carpenter, an expert in human behavior and emerging technologies who worked on developing Project Q. The voice of Q was developed by a team of researchers, sound designers and linguists in conjunction with the organizers of Copenhagen Pride week, technology leaders in an initiative called Equal AI and others. They first recorded dozens of voices of people -- those who identify as male, female, transgender or nonbinary.

The'world's first' AI-powered hearing aid connects to your smartphone and can translate speech into 27 different languages, say its creators. Experts claim to have mastered near-real time translation of Arabic, Japanese and French, among others, by listening for the foreign language and relaying it to the phone. The device is akin to the fictitious alien Babel fish that performs instant translations in comedy science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Creators Starkeys claim the technology reduces noisy environments by 50 per cent, while artificial intelligence optimises the hearing experience and its translation is compatible to Google Translate in terms of accuracy. The Livio AI, which is now on sale in the UK and costs £3,000 ($3,900), also has brain tracking technology and Alexa connectivity, and interfaces with the mobile app, Thrive Hearing.

If Apple's strategy this week is to build excitement for next week's "Show time" event, then it's doing a bang-up job. Following Monday's iPads and Tuesday's iMacs, Apple updated another popular product today with the launch of the second-generation AirPods that bring a new chip, new features, a new case, and more convenience. The new AirPods look exactly like the first-generation model, but include several key enhancements. The biggest is the addition of a new H1 chip, which Apple says was "developed specifically for headphones, delivers performance efficiencies, faster connect times, more talk time and the convenience of hands-free'Hey Siri.'" That means you no longer need to tap your ear to get Siri's attention.

Recall assistance methods are among the key aspects that improve the accuracy of online dietary assessment surveys. These methods still mainly rely on experience of trained interviewers with nutritional background, but data driven approaches could improve cost-efficiency and scalability of automated dietary assessment. We evaluated the effectiveness of a recommender algorithm developed for an online dietary assessment system called Intake24, that automates the multiple-pass 24-hour recall method. The recommender builds a model of eating behavior from recalls collected in past surveys. Based on foods they have already selected, the model is used to remind respondents of associated foods that they may have omitted to report. The performance of prompts generated by the model was compared to that of prompts hand-coded by nutritionists in two dietary studies. The results of our studies demonstrate that the recommender system is able to capture a higher number of foods omitted by respondents of online dietary surveys than prompts hand-coded by nutritionists. However, the considerably lower precision of generated prompts indicates an opportunity for further improvement of the system.

Tinder will no longer rely on a controversial method of sorting users based on an internal'desirability' score, according to a recent announcement from the company. Instead, the popular dating app's new algorithm will prioritize its patrons based on one overarching factor: volume of usage. The hidden ranking system that Tinder previously relied on assigned scores to users based on how many people have liked their profile. Tinder will no longer rely on a controversial method of sorting users based on an internal'desirability' score, according to a recent announcement from the company. According to the company, Tinder has matched 30 billion users around the world.

If you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on new bulbs, hubs, and thermostats, you can still make your home a whole lot smarter. And today's a great time to start: B&H Photo is selling the TP-Link HS300 smart Wi-Fi power strip for $55Remove non-product link when applying the 31 percent coupon on the listing,, along with a three-pack of TP-Link's HS200 smart Wi-Fi switches for $57Remove non-product link, nearly 50 percent off its list price of $105. The smart Wi-Fi power strip allows you to plug in up to six devices at once, and control them individually with their individual switches or by using the connected app. There are also three handy USB ports for charging up extra devices. Using TP-Link's Kasa app, you can set schedules and turn devices on and off remotely, as well as monitor energy usage.

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Welcome to the Google Home shadow market, a symbiotic ecosystem of third-party products that add a bit more versatility to the Google Home Mini and original Google Home smart speaker. Some grant true portability to Google's otherwise-tethered speakers. Others help you place the speakers in a more convenient position.