The one thing I know from going to the Consumer Electronics Show over the past few years is that every time you go, you will find at least one Chinese company that you've never heard of … and that makes just about every kind of electronics gadget you can imagine. This year that one Chinese company was Haier. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because Haier bought General Electric's appliance business in 2016. And if it doesn't, that's because the company hasn't really announced itself under its own brand widely. I did a walk-through of the company's booth, and it's worth skimming through despite the extremely authentic CES chaos, bustle, and noise.

AI research platform has experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding. AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in business. OpenAI is a non-profit Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company, associated with business magnate Elon Musk, that aims to carefully promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. The organization aims to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. The company is supported by over US$1 billion in commitments; however, only a tiny fraction of the $1 billion pledged is expected to be spent in the first few years. The founders are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.

It's easy to imagine a world in which "Alexa" is synonymous with talking computers, or Echo with smart speakers--just as Kleenex is synonymous with facial tissue, Xerox with copy machines, or Google with online search. They need a better name.) That's almost the world we live in today, thanks to the dramatic early success of Amazon's pioneering smart speaker and the surprisingly capable digital assistant that animates it. It's true that voice-powered smart speakers are on the path to ubiquity: Analysts predict that most U.S. households will eventually have one. But at a time when sales are booming around the world, it's becoming clear that Amazon's first-mover advantage wasn't built to last.

This work compares user collaboration with conversational personal assistants vs. teams of expert chatbots. Two studies were performed to investigate whether each approach affects accomplishment of tasks and collaboration costs. Participants interacted with two equivalent financial advice chatbot systems, one composed of a single conversational adviser and the other based on a team of four experts chatbots. Results indicated that users had different forms of experiences but were equally able to achieve their goals. Contrary to the expected, there were evidences that in the teamwork situation that users were more able to predict agent behavior better and did not have an overhead to maintain common ground, indicating similar collaboration costs. The results point towards the feasibility of either of the two approaches for user collaboration with conversational agents.

Trip recommendation is an important location-based service that helps relieve users from the time and efforts for trip planning. It aims to recommend a sequence of places of interest (POIs) for a user to visit that maximizes the user's satisfaction. When adding a POI to a recommended trip, it is essential to understand the context of the recommendation, including the POI popularity, other POIs co-occurring in the trip, and the preferences of the user. These contextual factors are learned separately in existing studies, while in reality, they impact jointly on a user's choice of a POI to visit. In this study, we propose a POI embedding model to jointly learn the impact of these contextual factors. We call the learned POI embedding a context-aware POI embedding. To showcase the effectiveness of this embedding, we apply it to generate trip recommendations given a user and a time budget. We propose two trip recommendation algorithms based on our context-aware POI embedding. The first algorithm finds the exact optimal trip by transforming and solving the trip recommendation problem as an integer linear programming problem. To achieve a high computation efficiency, the second algorithm finds a heuristically optimal trip based on adaptive large neighborhood search. We perform extensive experiments on real datasets. The results show that our proposed algorithms consistently outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in trip recommendation quality, with an advantage of up to 43% in F1-score.

As artificial intelligence (AI) takes hold in the workplace, both employers and employees believe it will benefit the enterprise and help workers to be more productive. In fact, 93% of employees would be willing to take instructions from a robot, according to a new study Oracle conducted together with Future Workplace. That's not surprising, when you consider that employees encounter AI all the time as consumers. Most people today have no problem following the route our navigation app chooses or asking Siri or Alexa to put together a music playlist. Employees are ready for that kind of experience to appear in the workplace.

For $1,000, the premium Galaxy Note 9 is a superb phone that showcases the best Samsung has to offer. It's also the phone most of you won't need. That's because you can get many of the same features in Samsung's Galaxy S9 for a few hundred dollars less. The Note 9, available Friday, is the Android smartphone for those who want the latest and the greatest. FILE- In this Aug. 7, 2018, file photo the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is shown in New York.

When we saw Bang & Olufsen's Google-Assistant enabled BeoSound speaker at CES in January, they didn't have a price or street date. Seven months later, that's changed. Now we know the Google Assistant-enabled, 360-degree speakers will be available starting mid-September for the portable BeoSound 1, and early October for the BeoSound 2. Hopefully you started saving back in January, because neither of these cost chump change by any stretch of the imagination. The BeoSound 1 will set you back $1,750 while the stationary BeoSound 2 commands a $2,250 asking price. Par for the course for the company, but a warning was in line nonetheless.

Walmart-backed Flipkart has just issued a challenge to Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. The home-grown e-commerce giant today announced that it has acquired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Liv.ai, which has developed a platform that converts speech-to-text in nine regional languages apart from English. With this move, the e-tailer hopes to soon offer an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for its users. "Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers. One does understand that building a voice interface is complex, and is especially challenging in Indian context given multiple languages and accents," Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in a statement.

Get my free AI Demo! Advances in technology and the resulting volume of data that PR and comms personnel have to work with has increased exponentially. Big data means people are spending more time managing information, rather than taking actions based on the insights it creates. In most industries, it isn't a question of if artificial intelligence should be implemented, but when. Competition in the information age is fast and fierce. If you're able to harness the potential of AI, you're going to grab that much needed edge. First, you need to know what artificial intelligence is. The term artificial intelligence was first used in 1956, as part of the Dartmouth Workshop. On a simple level, it describes a computer that reproduces human functions.