Amazon is once again throwing its hat into a new ring. The market heavyweight wants to start making its own artificial intelligence chips for its Echo speaker devices in an effort to better compete against Apple and Google, according to media reports. Amazon is starting to design custom AI hardware to power future Echo devices and improve the quality and response time of its "Alexa" voice-controlled personal assistant technology, according to a report first published by The Information. The move could help Amazon go head-to-head with rivals Apple and Google, which are already developing custom AI chips. Apple relies on custom-built chips from the likes of ARM for some of its smart devices but has also started developing its own chips for the iPhone.

In multi-objective decision planning and learning, much attention is paid to producing optimal solution sets that contain an optimal policy for every possible user preference profile. We argue that the step that follows, i.e, determining which policy to execute by maximising the user's intrinsic utility function over this (possibly infinite) set, is under-studied. This paper aims to fill this gap. We build on previous work on Gaussian processes and pairwise comparisons for preference modelling, extend it to the multi-objective decision support scenario, and propose new ordered preference elicitation strategies based on ranking and clustering. Our main contribution is an in-depth evaluation of these strategies using computer and human-based experiments. We show that our proposed elicitation strategies outperform the currently used pairwise methods, and found that users prefer ranking most. Our experiments further show that utilising monotonicity information in GPs by using a linear prior mean at the start and virtual comparisons to the nadir and ideal points, increases performance. We demonstrate our decision support framework in a real-world study on traffic regulation, conducted with the city of Amsterdam.

Every relationship has The Moment. Not the moment when you take your partner home to mom or when you finally compromise on the correct number of pillows to have on your bed. I mean The Moment when your potential boo reveals that they own an All Lives Matter shirt or that they sincerely believe that 9/11 was an inside job. Entering into this growing cohort of dating silos is Trump.dating, a new service that gives "like-minded Americans a chance to meet without the awkwardness that comes with the first conversation about politics." No longer will you have to swipe left on profile after profile that includes "proud liberal" or "no Trump supporters"--you now have your own digital mixer!

Nearly 70 Percent of Taxpayers Support Use of AI to Improve Accuracy of Filings, Accenture Global Survey Finds'Digital tax assistant' could prove especially beneficial to 40 percent of taxpayers who reported making filing errors NEW YORK; Feb. 20, 2018 – Nearly 70 percent of taxpayers in 12 countries said they would use AI to improve the accuracy of tax filings, according to a new study by Accenture (NYSE: ACN), which also found that more than 40 percent of taxpayers reported making a filing error in the last 24 months. The Accenture Digital Taxpayers Research asked more than 6,500 taxpayers across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America who interacted with their tax authority in the prior 12 months about their experiences with, attitudes about and expectations of revenue authorities. The findings indicate that in an era in which people around the world expect easy and simple consumer experiences, tax rules and regulations still confuse citizens. For instance, 38 percent of respondents said they are not confident they pay the right amount of tax, and 44 percent said they feel their tax knowledge could be improved. While most respondents said they have limited contact with their revenue authorities after filing a tax form, half (51 percent) reported contacting their revenue authority once or twice in the past year, with 20 percent reporting three or more contacts.

In a report last year, Gartner stated that "by 2018 organizations that have fully invested in all types of personalization will outsell companies that have not by 20%", and research by Forrester demonstrated that personalization is "critical for marketers seeking to enhance customer centricity and engagement". The Internet of Things (IoT), wearable devices, and Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) like Amazon Echo and Google Home, mean businesses have to reach consumers across a seemingly endless number of device types and channels. And as consumer expectations shift, meeting customers at their critical moment will be essential to business success. Which is why personalization offers marketers an incredible opportunity to differentiate from the crowd while growing customer engagement, conversions, and loyalty in the process. Many marketers find the prospect of personalization daunting.

A new dating site intended for Trump-admirers seeking other Trump-admirers for romance, Trump.Dating, up until the last few days featured the image of a convicted sex offender, Barrett Riddleberger, alongside his wife Jodi on its homepage, wearing his-and-hers hats reading "Trump" and "Make America Great Again." Details of Riddleberger's past were first reported by North Carolina paper Greensboro News & Record, in an article published in 2014, and resurfaced this week after local news outlets looked into Riddleberger's history. Riddleberger was convicted of "indecent liberty with a child", a felony, in 1995, according to North Carolina Department of Public Safety records. Although the file doesn't describe the crime in detail, the conviction reportedly stemmed from a 1993 incident in which Riddleberger videotaped himself having sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 25, according to the News & Record account. The site claims to "make dating great again" by "wrecking the dating game and giving like-minded Americans a chance to meet without the awkwardness that comes with the first conversation about politics," according to their website, and has attracted criticism for only allowing users to sign up as "straight men" or "straight women."

Music streaming service Spotify may already be working on its own smart speaker. A trio of job listings posted by Spotify suggest that the company is set to start manufacturing its new upcoming hardware product. "Spotify is on its way to creating its first physical products and setting up an operational organization for manufacturing, supply chain, sales & marketing," Spotify said on its "operations manager" job listing. Other hardware related job listings include "senior project manager: hardware production" and "project manager: hardware." The job listings were first spotted by MusicAlly.

Some people go to great lengths to get a date. Student Sam Dixey is no exception, but he may not have expected his dating-app slideshow presentation about his personal qualities to be shared by tens of thousands of people. Tinder user Gracie Barrow'swiped right' - to show interest in Sam's profile - only to find a series of photos and pancake references which left her "crying" with laughter. Since sharing the profile on Twitter, her post has been retweeted 20,000 times (and counting), and liked over 90,000 times. Although Sam created the profile last year, it was the tweet on Saturday which propelled attention to it.

Amazon has begun work on creating its own custom-made AI processors to power its Echo devices, reports have indicated, in order to decrease their reliance on the cloud. The addition of custom chips is intended to speed up the response times of Alexa, the company's AI assistant, a person familiar with the company's plans told The Information. At present, when users ask Alexa a question, the voice data is sent to Amazon's cloud to be analysed, interpreted and acted upon, whereas having dedicated silicon on the device allows much of that computation to be done locally. According to The Information, the e-tailer has nearly 450 employees with experience in the field of processor design, with many joining through a series of acquisitions including that of chip manufacturer Annapurna Labs for $350 million three years ago. The AI boom has sparked something of an arms race, with companies competing to develop specialised chips for performing the intensive workloads required for machine learning.

Having started my career in the pre-technology era, I am very accustomed to talking rather than texting. Plus, being from New York City, I frequently use my hands to communicate, gesturing to add emphasis or other emotions. All of this means that this new era of intelligent devices--objects you can speak to and wave at--is a very comfortable one for me. Voice-recognition technologies are among the top trends of 2018. Most of us are familiar with Siri, Google Home, and Alexa.