The next version of Windows 10 is finally ready to download as a free update that adds some potentially game-changing new features as well as some welcome features that bring it up to par with what you might expect from a smartphone. Instead of adding tools for people creating media, as the previous two updates have, the latest version of Windows 10 is focused on time and task management. "We want to give you back some of your greatest currency, your time. Our hope is that you'll have more time to do what matters most to you – create, play, work or simply do what you love," said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows and Devices group. That's what was reported earlier in the year, but Microsoft has made the wise choice to simplify the name this time round.

There's a new bot in town: Nigel, a software assistant that its creators at Oregon-based Kimera Systems say can learn from the behavior of its users. Nigel was "born" on Friday, when Kimera co-founder and CEO Mounir Shita fired up the program for a private beta test at a birthday party in downtown Portland. It's named after one of the software's principal architects, Nigel Deighton, who passed away in 2013. Kimera says a public beta version of the program will soon be made available. CEO Mounir Shita and COO Nick Gilman deliver Nigel! #AGI is born!

AI will help create 2.3 million jobs while eliminating 1.8 million jobs in 2020, although new types of skills will be needed "AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks (DNNs)," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. Thus, AI technologies are prompting technology strategic planners to redraw near-term and long-term product plans, says Lovelock. By 2020, he states, at least 40 per cent of people will interact primarily with people-literate technologies, removing much of the perceived need to invest further in improving computer literacy. Virtual private assistants (VPAs) and voice response systems, such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri, are becoming the norm for consumer interaction with search engines, along with many other services that would previously need interaction via web browsers, he says. "For many users, this AI functionality will become the norm, and there will no longer be the need to understand, or use, traditional computer operating systems or applications for many tasks," notes Lovelock.

Canada's two largest airlines say artificial intelligence can be a game-changer for aviation by helping to boost revenues, pare costs and provide passengers with a more personalized travel experience. Air Canada and WestJet are joining airlines around the world by spending undisclosed amounts of money on AI in an effort to harness technology that promises revolutionary advantages for both carriers and passengers. Several large airlines in the U.S. and Europe have deployed AI in chatbots that respond to common passenger questions, machine learning algorithms to help automate airline operations and facial recognition to verify identification for luggage and boarding. "It's really an untouched area for the airline industry that we need to develop very fast," new WestJet CEO Ed Sims said in an interview, adding he'd like to use the technology to create a "virtual concierge service" similar to Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The aviation sector's investment in AI is expected to grow from $152 million US this year to $2.22 billion US by 2025, for a compounded annual growth rate of more than 46 per cent, according to a report from research firm Markets and Markets.

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 104, 19-35.

Latent factor models with implicit feedback typically treat unobserved user-item interactions (i.e. missing information) as negative feedback. This is frequently done either through negative sampling (point-wise loss) or with a ranking loss function (pair- or list-wise estimation). Since a zero preference recommendation is a valid solution for most common objective functions, regarding unknown values as actual zeros results in users having a zero preference recommendation for most of the available items. In this paper we propose a novel objective function, the Missing Information Loss (MIL) function, that explicitly forbids treating unobserved user-item interactions as positive or negative feedback. We apply this loss to a user--based Denoising Autoencoder and compare it with other known objective functions such as cross-entropy (both point-- and pair--wise) or the recently proposed multinomial log-likelihood. The MIL function achieves best results in ranking-aware metrics when applied to the Movielens-20M and Netflix datasets, slightly above those obtained with cross-entropy in point-wise estimation. Furthermore, such a competitive performance is obtained while recommending popular items less frequently, a valuable feature for Recommender Systems with a large catalogue of products.

I was one of the beta users of Amazon's Alexa when it first came out three years ago. My wife, Sara thought it was silly at the start, but she has grown to love her as our home digital assistant. But artificial intelligence (AI) technology is no longer just for consumers. With its zero-user interface, it can help transform the way a small business works. An AI can transcribe calls for company sales reps and then enable a comparison of the strategies used by the most successful sales reps with the rest of the company.

Canada's two largest airlines say artificial intelligence can be a game-changer for aviation by helping to boost revenues, pare costs and provide passengers with a more personalized travel experience. Air Canada and WestJet are joining airlines around the world by spending undisclosed amounts of money on AI in an effort to harness technology that promises revolutionary advantages for both carriers and passengers. Several large airlines in the U.S. and Europe have deployed AI in chatbots that respond to common passenger questions, machine learning algorithms to help automate airline operations and facial recognition to verify identification for luggage and boarding. "It's really an untouched area for the airline industry that we need to develop very fast," new WestJet CEO Ed Sims said in an interview, adding he'd like to use the technology to create a "virtual concierge service" similar to Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The aviation sector's investment in AI is expected to grow from US$152 million this year to US$2.22 billion by 2025, for a compounded annual growth rate of more than 46 per cent, according to a report from research firm Markets and Markets.

Voice is being predicted as the next big thing in the computer interaction and perhaps why both Amazon and Google are fighting to take control over our lives with their AI-driven virtual assistants -- Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. These voice-based assistants can do a lot of things with just one command: play music, crack jokes; give the weather forecasts; send text messages; set up alarms and reminders; read out the latest news; and control "smart" devices in the home such as thermostats, door locks and bulbs. Interestingly, these virtual assistants become better over time and get to know your habits as you use them more often. I decided to ask Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant 12 questions on the Echo Dot and Home Mini, to determine their intelligence level. What are the best Hindi songs of 2018?

On Saturday, iPhone users around the world began testing and confirming what is arguably Siri's most bizarre response to a question yet. Before grabbing your own phone to test this out, however, be mindful of anybody else around. The randy robo-response was apparently first reported on Reddit's Apple community, where a user by the name "thatwasabaddecision" suggested that people ask Siri to "define the word mother," wait for the assistant to ask for an additional definition, and say "yes." What the Reddit user didn't point out, which readers learned by doing the test themselves, was that the second definition Siri offers is succinct and seemingly inaccurate. "As a noun," the computer-generated voice says as of press time, "it means, short for'motherfucker.'"