Skip-gram with negative sampling, a popular variant of Word2vec originally designed and tuned to create word embeddings for Natural Language Processing, has been used to create item embeddings with successful applications in recommendation. While these fields do not share the same type of data, neither evaluate on the same tasks, recommendation applications tend to use the same already tuned hyperparameters values, even if optimal hyperparameters values are often known to be data and task dependent. We thus investigate the marginal importance of each hyperparameter in a recommendation setting, with an extensive joint hyperparameter optimization on various datasets. Results reveal that optimizing neglected hyperparameters, namely negative sampling distribution, number of epochs, subsampling parameter and window-size, significantly improves performance on a recommendation task, and can increase it up to a factor of $10$.

"By 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human" – Gartner Today's customers live in an omnichannel world. But most companies still force these evolved customers onto engagement paths that are steeped in legacy and instantly feel outdated. Artificial intelligence can be successfully employed to provide an intelligent, convenient and informed customer experience at any point along the customer journey. This will result in re-imagined customer experiences and end-to-end customer journeys that are integrated and more personal, so that they feel more natural to customers. In this post, I will lay out why artificial intelligence is a game changer in CX, take a look under the hood at how AI is applied to CX, and explore use cases for how leading edge companies are already reaping benefits from AI applications in customer experience.

Car chargers are essential for keeping your phone powered up during busy days. They're a boring, necessary accessory that get the job done, but usually don't spice up the drive. This car charger is compatible with the Alexa smart assistant found in the heart of Amazon Echo, and you can get it right now for $40 on Amazon, almost 20 percent off its average price. It's never been cheaper on the retail site. The Anker Roav Viva's Alexa compatibility allows you to use the skills normally associated with Echo, so you can get directions, listen to news and weather updates, stream music, make calls, order pizza, control the connected devices in your home, and more in your car--all hands-free.

Another day, another sign that Tinder is ruining dating. This week's omen comes from a piece published over at the Outline on the digital pep talks dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are sending to their users. According to Renée Lynn Reizman, reminders to devote all your attention to the slot machine game of endless swiping are now coming with a little something extra. During a recent binge session of Netflix's Queer Eye, Reizman felt her phone vibrate and, "desperately in need of a little confidence boost," she hoped it was a new match from Tinder. While it was indeed a push notification from Tinder, it wasn't a match.

In The News This Week is a page intended to keep my readers up to speed with anything new that I pickup online or offline that has to do with the robotic world that we are now entering very rapidly. Other pages of this website reviews a number robots that we are using on a daily basis in order to help make our lives easier, or as hobby, sport, or for professional purposes. If you would like to share your experience with any kind of robots you are using, or simply comment or ask questions, please feel free to do so at the bottom of any page or article. My latest article of "In The News This Week" starts from here. A house of 95 m2 / 1,022 sq ft has already been built thanks to this new technique. On the slab of freshly poured concrete, a robot moves on its wheels and makes work tirelessly with his articulated arm. He draws expansive foam cords one above the other to form a shuttering in which he then pour the concrete. This is how he manages to build perfectly insulated walls on each side at a bewildering speed. "It's been an hour and a half since the work began and the walls are already over 80 cm / 31 in. It is not a prototype, he pointed out, but a place that is meant to be useful. The 95 m2 / 1,022 sq ft house was finished by the end of that week and ready for the coming Christmas once the finishing work was completed. After being opened to the public, this T 5 will then be inhabited, a year later, by "traditional" tenants on the Nantes Métropole Habitat waiting list. "This house, which is already certified, says Benoit Furet, teacher-researcher at the University of Nantes at the heart of this project is called Yhnova.

Hype over artificial intelligence reached its zenith in 2017, with CIOs, consultants and academics touting the technology as potentially automating anything from business and IT operations to customer connections. Yet through the first calendar quarter of 2018 several media organizations reported on the dangers of AI, which involves training computers to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. "There's been so much hype in the media about it and this is just journalists trying to extend the hype by talking about the negative side," says Thomas Davenport, a Babson College distinguished professor who teaches a class on cognitive technologies. Perhaps, but the concerns are hardly new and very persistent, ranging from fears about racial, gender and other biases to automated drones running amok with potentially lethal consequences. Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter.

There is a shift happening in the way we as a species communicate with machines. With the advent of Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana, the focus on Voice User Interfaces or Voice Activated Conversational Interfaces is rapidly increasing. This ever changing world presents a threat to the way we operate, especially when we do not understand it. A more AI aware world might be years away, but if we learn how to talk to and control the machines then we grow collectively. Yes, Amazon Alexa and similar voice activated interfaces look and sound pretty cool.

This is a technical deep dive of the collaborative filtering algorithm and how to use it in practice. From Amazon recommending products you may be interested in based on your recent purchases to Netflix recommending shows and movies you may want to watch, recommender systems have become popular across many applications of data science. Like many other problems in data science, there are several ways to approach recommendations. Two of the most popular are collaborative filtering and content-based recommendations. Content-based Recommendations: If companies have detailed metadata about each of your items, they can recommend items with similar metadata tags.

Digital disruption is the flip side of digital opportunity. Established companies and startups alike enlist new technologies in the fight to dislodge incumbents, protect entrenched positions, or re-invent entire industries and business activities. To help business and IT executives evaluate emerging technologies and their potential impact on the digital transformation of their organizations, Forrester recently published "Top Technologies for Digital Predators, 2017," a detailed analysis of 15 emerging technologies with a wide range of disruptive potential and time-to-impact. Here's my summary description of the 5 technologies with the highest potential to create competitive advantage, change markets, or alter the business landscape altogether: AI solutions that can interact with their users, learn their behavior and understand their needs, and even make decisions on their behalf. The landscape for this emerging technology is expanding rapidly to include a wide range of chatbots, virtual agents, robotic process automation, and other digital assistants.

Get the week started off right with a look at Sony's smaller flagship phone and some exciting news for Splinter Cell fans. Time to upgrade?Apple may unveil red iPhone 8 and 8 Plus models this week MacRumors has obtained a Virgin Mobile memo claiming (Product) Red versions of the 8 and 8 Plus will be announced soon, possibly as early as April 9th. It's definitely time to upgrade.NVIDIA will end 32-bit OS GeForce support this month NVIDIA will halt GeForce GPU driver support for 32-bit systems at the end of April, meaning users will lose access to new GeForce Experience features and game-ready updates. Moreover, NVIDIA will end security updates by January 2019, so continuing to use your 32-bit Windows or Linux OS with a GeForce card beyond that date could actually put it at risk. Search, smart home control and third-party integrations.What Siri can learn from Google Assistant Not only is Apple beefing up its phones with "neural engine" chips to power AI efforts like augmented reality and machine learning, it's also building out its Siri team. The company recently listed 161 open positions and hired Carnegie Mellon's Russ Salakhutdinov last year to head up AI research.