Perhaps the single most important algorithmic distinction between "born digital" enterprises and legacy companies is not their people, data sets, or computational resources, but a clear real-time commitment to delivering accurate, actionable customer recommendations. Recommendation engines (or recommenders) force organizations to fundamentally rethink how to get greater value from their data while creating greater value for their customers. "Build real recommendation engines fast" is my mission-critical recommendation to companies aspiring -- or struggling -- to creatively cross the digital divide. Use recommenders to make it easier to gain better insight into customers while they're getting better information about you. Recommenders' true genius comes from their opportunity to build virtuous business cycles: The more people use them, the more valuable they become; the more valuable they become, the more people use them.

Reports of Amazon's virtual artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa behaving strangely have recently made the rounds on the news and social media. Several Alexa-enabled devices have reportedly started talking or laughing without being prompted, or doing so instead of performing a command. Naturally, Alexa owners who heard this freaked out, with many resorting to turning off the AI assistants or unplugging their devices. These incidents didn't go unnoticed by Amazon, which immediately set out to fix the bug. On March 7, Amazon released a statement explaining Alexa's sudden gleeful outbursts: "In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase'Alexa, laugh,'" the company said.

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, was laughing when it shouldn't. You might have seen tweets about it: The weird, disembodied chuckle bothered people for reasons you can imagine, as well as because it reportedly could happen unprompted--our assistants, after all, are only supposed to listen and speak to us after they hear the wake word. We want them to tell us the weather and set kitchen timers on command, not spook us with laughter. We all know that virtual personas like Alexa, Siri, and the Google Assistant are not real humans. They can't laugh the way we laugh, because they are not alive.

To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.

For weeks, users of Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa, have reported versions of the same unsettling event: being startled as they went about their day by Alexa letting out an eerie laugh. Now, Amazon says that it knows why that's been happening and is working to fix the problem. "In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase'Alexa, laugh,'" when other words are spoken, Amazon said in an emailed statement. "We are changing that phrase to be'Alexa, can you laugh?' which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance'Alexa, laugh.'" The company also said that instead of simply laughing when asked, the digital assistant, which is accessible through its line of Echo devices, will first acknowledge the request, saying, "Sure, I can laugh."

A number of major internet companies are making a final push to urge lawmakers to modify a proposed bill that would allow victims of human trafficking to sue websites that facilitate the crime, Axios reported. At issue for the companies is the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a bill that would increase the amount of accountability on online platforms for content created and posted by its users--including opening the companies up to lawsuits from victims of crimes that are aided by the online services. A number of tech firms are working to stop a bill designed to fight human trafficking. A letter from tech advocacy and lobbying group Engine was sent to members of the United States Senate Wednesday in an effort to convince lawmakers to reconsider their position before voting on the bill. Signatories of the letter include popular social network platforms including Reddit, Twitter and Pinterest.

In smart buildings, in this context non-residential buildings for offices, we indeed see an increasing role of smart office and smart workplace applications as IoT and data are also driving the further integration on the overall facility optimization level and areas such as lighting control, room control, space management, building management in an age of IoT and IoT-enabled office and workplace applications. And, indeed, here as well AI plays a role on several fronts as also in buildings intelligence moves to the edge and of course into the smart office.

Every time there is a big wireless, telecom or technology trade show, the big question I am always asked by the media as a telecom and wireless analyst, is simple. What was the key message or take away from the show? Last week, at the world's largest wireless trade show, Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain, the answer was clear. First it is about 5G, with plenty of AI and IoT mixed in. Yes, our world is rapidly changing. So, what will 5G, AI and IoT do for us?

It all started in the days following the release of the original Echo. Amazon was taking a gamble with a new hardware category: an always-on personal assistant for the home. And as early customer feedback started to roll in, Amazon realized that Echo had to grow beyond voice commands. "We realized that there were some use cases where it would probably be more friendly if you could confirm things on a display," said Miriam Daniel, Amazon's director of product management. This sparked the idea for the Echo Show, the first Echo product with a screen.

Ed Baig reviews the Samsung Galaxy S9 (S9), from super slow-mo to AR Emojis. Samsung Galaxy S9 comes in three colors in the U.S. This one is lilac purple. When Samsung unleashed the Galaxy S4 smartphone in 2013, it piled on so many newfeatures, I joked that it was like Samsung was auditioning for a Las Vegas magic act. Fast-forward five years to the Galaxy S9 and S9 that I've been checking out for a week and a half, and it's comforting that Samsung no longer goes hog wild with parlor tricks, unless you want to count super slo-mo video or animated emojis.