Mobile World Congress, for obvious reasons, isn't really known for its laptop announcements. Lenovo is bucking that trend today, however, with three mid-range convertibles sporting the Yoga name. The most exciting is the Yoga 730, a sleek 2-in-1 that sits below the company's flagship Thinkpad X1 line and the popular Yoga 920. It will be available in 13- and 15-inch variations, sporting similar designs but slightly different upgrade options. They'll be joined by the Flex 14 (which will be marketed as the Yoga 530 outside of North America) a cheaper alternative with a near-identical form factor.

At the year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, PC maker Lenovo showed off a handful of 2-in-1 PCs, some with new smart assistant software and game-ready graphics. The Yoga 730 is the latest laptop to add Alexa, Amazon's smart assistant. At CES 2018, we saw Alexa announced for select ThinkPad laptops, but those were aimed at business users. The Yoga is a more mainstream product, making this yet another inroad for Alexa. Of course, since the Yoga 730 is a Windows machine, you can always use Cortana, the Microsoft smart assistant, as well.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay and there is no turning back in the march of this technology as many devices and services are already integrated with this advanced computing power. Globally, businesses and government are exploring how AI can be used to enhance their services, and India is also not far behind in adopting the advanced practices. The advent of handsets with internet connection is one of the key factors enabling technology to make deep inroads in India. Aadhaar is a classic example of AI technology with biometric recognition being one of the key facets of its application. PwC India in its recent survey report titled "Artificial Intelligence--Hype or Reality" found that 60% of respondents believe that AI will enable people to live richer lives and further socio-economic causes such as economic growth, health and education and cybersecurity. Sudipta Ghosh, partner and leader, Data and Analytics, PwC India said, "Indian businesses, the government and individuals have, in recent years, also seen multiple use cases of AI in various facets of life.

We have been using smartphones for over 20 years now. They have evolved from clunky brick-like devices, only to return back to clunky brick-like devices. Companies have toyed with various form factors, from flip phones to bendy phones and several other impractical designs. But it seems like the'slab' is here to stay. Limitations of the smartphone, include its small screen sizes, inefficiency multitasking, being a general nuisance in public, and not to mention the small fact that they can be used to spy on us.

San Francisco, US, February 16, 2018 -- Microsoft keeps pushing their assistant AI Cortana, in competition to Siri, Alexa, the Google Assistant, and works together with IFTTT to reach more devices and users. Cortana might be the forgotten contender from the voice assistant wars, as Microsoft-powered mobile devices fall into oblivion. But, there are still millions of Windows 10 PCs and tablets out there that can take your verbal orders via the company's home help. And for smart home users, the sexy creation from Halo reduced to your desktop buddy can now play a wider role thanks to IFTTT (If This, Then That) integration that enables it to work with a wider range of smart home devices. These include ecobee (pictured) and Honeywell smart thermostats, LIFX smart lighting and a range of other products, adding to the roster of supported gadgets.

Many machine intelligence techniques are developed in E-commerce and one of the most essential components is the representation of IDs, including user ID, item ID, product ID, store ID, brand ID, category ID etc. The classical encoding based methods (like one-hot encoding) are inefficient in that it suffers sparsity problems due to its high dimension, and it cannot reflect the relationships among IDs, either homogeneous or heterogeneous ones. In this paper, we propose an embedding based framework to learn and transfer the representation of IDs. As the the implicit feedbacks of users, a tremendous amount of item ID sequences can be easily collected from the interactive sessions. By jointly using these informative sequences and the structural connections among IDs, all types of IDs can be embedded into one low-dimensional semantic space. Subsequently, the learned representations are utilized and transferred in four scenarios: (i) measuring the similarity between items, (ii) transferring from seen items to unseen items, (iii) transferring across different domains, (iv) transferring across different tasks. We deploy and evaluate the proposed approach in Hema App and the results validate its effectiveness.

As machine learning and other areas of AI advance so does the tooling. Tooling for machine learning has become an abstraction upon complex mathematical algorithms that open up the technology to a wider audience. Advanced tooling like Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Service APIs are available to software developers to use with limited to zero knowledge of the inner workings. For example, machine learning can be applied to images to enhance an application through computer vision. Computer vision allows developers to let the algorithm automate processes.

Just a few decades ago, interactions were slow. Customers sent their complaints through the mail, waiting months for a response that may never arrive. As technology advanced, businesses offered new ways to innovate and improve customer engagement -- at ever-increasing speeds. Snail mail became phone banks with advanced logical routing to subject matter experts. Then the conversation moved online, with inventions such as live chat and interactive voice response creating new channels for engaging with the customer.

Consider, if you will, the Olympic Village. It's no wonder that dating apps like Tinder light up the moment the Olympics begin… and that the Village has a reputation as a sort of sex Shangri-La. But despite the condoms that reportedly litter the Olympic Village by the end of the Winter Games--a record 110,000, or 38 per athlete, were provided this year--many will go unused because of pre-game superstitions. Plenty of elite athletes abstain from sex before competing--even though there's no scientific evidence to support their decision from either a physical or psychological perspective. Supposedly, athletes who swipe left on sex before competitions have an advantage on the field. Theories vary as to the exact reason why.

Samsung is betting that the future of smartphones lies in the camera. The firm today launched its highly-anticipated flagship'iPhone X killers', the Galaxy S9 (£739/$720) and S9 plus (£869/$839). Both feature a familiar all-screen design, but have a re-invented camera system that has been dubbed a'game-changer'. One of the biggest improvements is new dual-aperture technology. This allows the camera to automatically adjust the aperture depending on the scene that is being shot. The displays are the same as their predecessors, at 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch, respectively.