Recommender systems are being used to suggest products to customers, provide personalized product information, and even to provide product reviews. ese systems recommend items among a huge number of possibilities according to users' interests. Recommender systems have al- so been proposed to support the information selection and decision-making processes on e-com- merce web sites. is is the fourth recommender systems special track running in parallel with FLAIRS. The goal of this new special track has been to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to share their e orts in addressing current issues, challenges, novel approaches, and applica- tions within the broad scope of recommender systems. We continue to aim to cover a wide variety of research areas where recommender systems may be researched and applied.

This paper presents a reading recommendation system based on morpho-phonological, lexical, and syntactic features reflecting both textual complexity and the learner’s linguistic proficiency. The goal of this system is to optimize the reading process of ESL learners by proposing the fittest text to their needs given their incrementally built profile (weighted history of read texts). Fifteen features out of an initial pool of 90 candidates were selected. A corpus of 5052 texts of different levels was collected and used to build the system. To make the system more adaptive, a Progress Rate (PRate) measure was also proposed and integrated into the search process. Finally, the evaluation of the system showed positive results.

The popularity of Amazon's Echo smart speakers has helped push the audience for digital radio past that of FM and AM in the UK for the first time. The milestone, which was reached in the first quarter of this year, could prompt the government to launch a review to evaluate whether it should switch off the FM signal. Digital, which covers listening via digital audio broadcasting (DAB) sets in homes and cars, televisions and through services such as Echo, hit a record share of 50.9% of all radio listening in the three months to March. Amazon's smart speakers, powered by the virtual assistant Alexa, have helped reinvent the medium for a new, tech-savvy generation, many of whom have failed to embrace traditional radio listening. Listening online and via apps proved to be by far the fastest-growing segment of digital consumption, with hours of listening in the first quarter surging by 14m (17%) year on year to 95m hours.

Artificial intelligence has gone from the imagination of people like Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke, and is now a part of every aspect of technology. The future of smartphones revolves around terminologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and augmented reality. We're starting to see this happen already, as most smartphone manufacturers now stress that their devices have AI baked in. But is the hype justified, or are we hearing about AI now because the hardware seems to have reached a plateau? What's clear is that the next revolution lies in software, in bringing actual intelligence to "smart" phones, and that's why AI has to be implemented at all stages of the smartphone experience.

Audio Analytic's CEO Chris Mitchel smashes window panes with a sledge hammer to help teach machines how to hear the sound of breaking glass as well as humans. Amazon's Echo speaker knows that you only have to say "Alexa" to wake it up. But technically it can't tell the difference between two people murmuring in the corner of the room and the sound of radio static. That would take a deeper dive into the building blocks of sound itself. But one small startup in Cambridge, UK has spent ten years building up an entirely new language of sound which, for the first time, will allow machines to recognize the sound of human speech.

We are rapidly moving toward a workplace where people interact with machines on a routine basis. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), and the chatbots that it powers, technology is now interwoven into many of our everyday job tasks. In fact, it has been reported that more than 80 percent of businesses plan to be using chatbots by 2020. Over the past few years, technology has made huge advances in approximating human interaction, especially when it comes to speech recognition and detection of emotions, visual cues and voice intonation. From Alexa to Siri to Google Home, these technologies are becoming more ubiquitous at a tremendous pace and will have a big impact on how we perform our jobs in the years to come.

Some Onkyo receivers are getting the Work with Sonos seal of approval -- you'll soon be able to stream tunes from the Sonos app to Onkyo, Integra and Pioneer Elite receivers. You can add Onkyo devices to an existing Sonos setup as well, which might come in handy for a multi-room setup. Some Onkyo systems already have Google Assistant support via Google Home, and the Sonos tie-up will similarly add limited Alexa controls through Amazon's Echo hardware, the company told Twice. It's a positive move for Onkyo owners who might want to combine their systems with Sonos speakers into a more streamlined setup. Onkyo will reveal the specific models involved on June 6th, when the firmware update is scheduled to drop.

Benevolent hackers are trying to expose weaknesses in Amazon Echo and Google Home, hopefully to the benefit of users. There's a new and novel way to snoop on Google Home and Amazon Echo devices, researchers have told Forbes. It's called "voice squatting" and was uncovered by a group of researchers from Indiana University, Bloomington, the University of Virginia and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The hack abuses what're known as "skill markets." Those markets open up third-party services, from banking to cat fact apps, that can be called with certain commands.

"Never before in history have such a small number of designers – a handful of young, mostly male engineers, living in the Bay Area of California, working at a handful of tech companies – had such a large influence on two billion people's thoughts and choices." Those are the words of Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and founder of Time Well Spent, a not-for-profit initiative to help educate businesses, users, and designers about morally acceptable technology design choices. However, he and the entire high-tech industry may not be going far enough, or fast enough. Take for instance Google, Tristan's former employer. Recently at their annual I/O conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the company's "Duplex" technology nested within the Google Assistant project.

From targeted digital ads and chatbots to voice assistants and Amazon's impending home robot. Artificial intelligence has surfaced in a wide range of ways and as it continues to evolve, it will transform both marketers and their agencies, says IBM's Jay Henderson. "I tend to think of artificial intelligence around two lines," said Henderson, director of Watson Marketing at IBM. "Marketers are going to be able to infuse A.I.-technology to create more personalized, informed interactions with customers and it will help companies work smarter and be more efficient and effective with their efforts." According to a recent report from eMarketer, 80 percent of b-to-b marketing executives believe that A.I. is going to revolutionize the marketing industry in the next two years. The report, called "Artificial Intelligence for Marketers 2018: Finding Value Behind the Hype," highlights Garner's prediction of worldwide spending on A.I. technology to grow significantly in the next four years, with an estimated $6 billion in investments this year and $29 billion by 2021.