"Touted as the new electricity, AI is the power behind many emerging technology platforms," says the report. Travel websites'learn' how to give more personalised results while chat platforms improve service. Although AI has a long way to go, it will undoubtedly be a huge player in the future, says the WTTC. Connected sensors, devices and machines can create a new form of dialogue with the'real' physical world. IoT has huge implications for airlines but also for hotels where smart home technology can provide some of the largest improvements to the travel experience of the future.

In today's day and age when almost every industry has an online presence with users interacting in online marketplaces, personalized recommendations have become quite important. Traditionally, the problem of collaborative filtering has been tackled using Matrix Factorization which is linear in nature. We extend the work of [11] on using variational autoencoders (VAEs) for collaborative filtering with implicit feedback by proposing a hybrid, multi-modal approach. Our approach combines movie embeddings (learned from a sibling VAE network) with user ratings from the Movielens 20M dataset and applies it to the task of movie recommendation. We empirically show how the VAE network is empowered by incorporating movie embeddings. We also visualize movie and user embeddings by clustering their latent representations obtained from a VAE.

In a truly fascinating exploration into two smart speakers – the Sonos One and the Amazon Echo – BoltVC's Ben Einstein has found some interesting differences in the way a traditional speaker company and an infrastructure juggernaut look at their flagship devices. The post is well worth a a full read but the gist is this: Sonos, a very traditional speaker company, has produced a good speaker and modified its current hardware to support smart home features like Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos One, notes Einstein, is a speaker first and smart hardware second. "Digging a bit deeper, we see traditional design and manufacturing processes for pretty much everything. As an example, the speaker grill is a flat sheet of steel that's stamped, rolled into a rounded square, welded, seams ground smooth, and then powder coated black. While the part does look nice, there's no innovation going on here," he writes.

The U.S. attorney's office in Atlanta said in a news release Friday that the Nigerians created fake online dating profiles with photos of models or public figures. Prosecutors said they targeted people with financial assets, spending weeks or months courting them.

USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa. LOS ANGELES -- Alexa is great for listening to music and answering trivia questions, but when it comes to shopping...well, that's another story. If you have one of the classic Echo speakers, you know that there are no visuals to see the product in question and once Alexa makes suggestions, it's hard to comparison shop or get the best prices. But Amazon wants you to buy this way, and throws some special deals that can only be accessed by asking Alexa for them. On Prime Day, many specials will be Alexa-only.

Apple unveiled some refreshed MacBook Pros this week, and I promised we'd be getting a unit to review ASAP. Sure enough, look what arrived in the mail today: a shiny, new 13-inch Mac. As you can see, the exterior design is the same as the previous-gen MacBook Pro's, from the unibody aluminum enclosure to that giant Force Touch trackpad. Most of the changes here are under the hood (think: quad-core processors on the 13-inch model), so it's going to take a few days to test things like speed, graphics performance and battery life. We'll post a full review next week (and, ya know, spend the weekend indoors putting this thing through its paces).

Frank is always pressed for time. He has spent almost a decade as the head of a retail store for a large chain. Over the last few years, he has been steadily handed over the reins of four other stores in the chain. His knowledge and expertise are beyond doubt. The problem is that while work has multiplied several folds and his responsibilities have grown, he still has only 24 hours in a workday.

USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa.

You can read this situation a couple different ways. On the one hand, some will conclude that Apple either performs the same types of data collection that Google does or that it wants to, and that bringing Giannandrea onboard is an effort to match the search giant in this area. But another potential option is that the value of Google's data about its users may be less central to the question of why Siri has lagged behind its competitors than is immediately apparent. We're not claiming the data hypothesis isn't true -- we've got no insight on it one way or the other -- but it's also the sort of explanation that could be a contributing factor without constituting the overriding reason why a situation looks the way it does. Either way, Apple is clearly planning to make some significant changes to its AI/ML development programs.

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea. Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme. The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple's internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they're wedded to various projects, including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more.