Being a child must be terribly confusing--hence all of the "why" and "how" questions. With no guidebook, no references, no context--no understanding of history and how society came to be, or of reproduction and how they came to be--the world is mystifying for its newest members, and growing up is a gradual process of demystification. It's no wonder kids have so many questions. It's also no wonder that they are enthralled by Alexa, the disembodied know-it-all on hand to answer their stream of queries. Smart speakers are the perfect players for their game of Twenty Million Questions.

Donning pre-production versions of Doppler's Here One wireless earbuds, they experienced the device's ability to cancel out unwanted background noise, amplify the voice of a particular person in the room, and even converse with people speaking in another language. About a half-second after a Doppler staffer asked a question in Spanish, the wearer heard a computerized translation back into English. At least two of the companies made informal acquisition bids, but none offered a high-enough price to convince Doppler to give up its dreams of launching a momentous new product. Sales failed to take off, and a year later the company was shuttered. Within weeks of its closing, more than half of Doppler's top technologists were working for the tech giants.

LG's deep collaboration with Google continues, as it just announced that Google Assistant is coming to ThinQ smart TVs in seven more markets and five languages. LG will also expand Amazon Alexa support to Australia and Canada. Google Assistant first arrived to ThinQ AI TVs in the US earlier this year. Google Assistant on LG ThinQ TVs lets you control smart lights, appliances, robotic vacuums and other home devices, check the weather, make a restaurant reservation and more. You can also shout at the TV (via the "mic" button on the remote) or Google Home devices to pause ThinQ TV programming, change channels, lower the volume, etc. Google Home support for ThinQ TVs works now in Canada, Australia and the UK, and non-English language support for France, Spain, South Korea and Germany will arrive by the end of 2018.

The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose. Bots--simple computer scripts--were originally designed to automate repetitive tasks like organizing content or conducting network maintenance, thus sparing humans hours of tedium. Companies and media outlets also use bots to operate social-media accounts, to instantly alert users of breaking news or promote newly published material. But they can also be used to operate large numbers of fake accounts, which makes them ideal for manipulating people.

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.