The Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCD has announced a new colloborative research project with Samsung Electronics estimated to be worth approximately €4 million. The Insight Centre for Data Analytics is a joint initiative between researchers at UCD, NUI Galway, UCC, DCU, and other partner institutions. The €75 million Research Centre is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and a wide range of industry partners. The research project is set to centre around artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems, such as recommender systems, play an important role in today's information rich world and in many aspects of our lives.

Apple fans who are worried about the firm's smart devices recording their private conversations may be in for some good news, according to a new find. Experts discovered icons in the latest version of iOS that suggest always-listening microphones on Apple's Homepod speaker can be disabled. The delayed £350 ($349) 'Echo-killer', which will be activated with the words'Hey Siri', is due for release in the next four to six weeks. If confirmed, the microphone mute feature will assuage privacy concerns raised over smart speakers eavesdropping on conversations. Apple fans who are worried about the firm's smart devices recording their private conversations may be in for some good news.

As the tech evolves and seeps into the lives of many, it impacts on how they work and live, with the creation growing stronger. The AI Effect, otherwise known as AI is whatever hasn't been done yet, is well known within the artificial intelligence community. As the tech improves each year, however, what hasn't been done is gradually becoming a smaller pool. It feels like the last three years have been decisive for artificial intelligence. Infrastructure has afforded those working on AI to reach new levels and figure out more complex algorithms.

There will come a day, and probably pretty soon, where pretty much every standalone speaker will have a voice-operated assistant inside of it. In the same way way that most TVs today have integrated "smarts" in the form of streaming apps for video, "smart speakers" will simply be the default, offering streaming audio apps and music at your voice's beck and call. At CES 2018 there were a raft of new models were announced with either Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or a mixture of both. From the JBL Link View to the Polk Command Bar to Klipsch's The One, most audio brands had at least one speaker on display. And the list is only going to grow, and move far beyond traditional audio brands.

Online A/B testing evaluates the impact of a new technology by running it in a real production environment and testing its performance on a subset of the users of the platform. It is a well-known practice to run a preliminary offline evaluation on historical data to iterate faster on new ideas, and to detect poor policies in order to avoid losing money or breaking the system. For such offline evaluations, we are interested in methods that can compute offline an estimate of the potential uplift of performance generated by a new technology. Offline performance can be measured using estimators known as counterfactual or off-policy estimators. Traditional counterfactual estimators, such as capped importance sampling or normalised importance sampling, exhibit unsatisfying bias-variance compromises when experimenting on personalized product recommendation systems. To overcome this issue, we model the bias incurred by these estimators rather than bound it in the worst case, which leads us to propose a new counterfactual estimator. We provide a benchmark of the different estimators showing their correlation with business metrics observed by running online A/B tests on a large-scale commercial recommender system.

In this opinion piece, Melotti Media founder Christopher Melotti (pictured below) explores how voice-activated virtual assistants will significantly change the landscape of marketing, content creation and copywriting. The next revolution in technology and marketing is voice. The age of voice-activated virtual assistants and vocal command technology is upon us – Apple's Siri, Google's Home, Amazon's Alexa, Samsung's Bixby, Microsoft's Cortana, Ozlo, X.ai, just to name a few. History shows that the businesses who embrace new opportunities like this are the ones to reap to rewards, while those who lag behind become quickly ignored by customers. My message to brands: don't get left behind.

With the power of the human brain increasing manifold, the degree of technological advancement is also correspondingly getting infinite. With Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) clearly making its presence felt across several industries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are not far behind. In fact, the future looks to be largely governed by these two forces so much so that several businesses are driving their investment in this direction, banking on the innovative benefits that it promises. AI unfolds itself as a significant game-changer by being a key player in the process of digital transformation for a wide range of industries. In order to understand how AI is culminating to be the next driving force in the technology paradigm, let us understand how it all started and what its primary capabilities are.

For technology users who have marveled at the ability of Siri or Alexa to recognize their voice, consider this: The National Security Agency has apparently been way ahead of Apple or Amazon. The agency has at its disposal voice recognition technology that it employs to identify terrorists, government spies, or anyone they choose -- with just a phone call, according to a report by The Intercept. The disclosure was revealed in a recently published article, part of a trove of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The publication wrote that by using recorded audio, the NSA is able to create a "voiceprint," or a map of qualities that mark a voice as singular, and identify the person speaking. The documents also suggest the agency is continuously improving its speech recognition capabilities, the publication noted.

By Varun Mathur Mobile banking was one of the first apps for smartphones. Financial brands led the charge on the first mainstream wearable, the Apple Watch. Now, conversational interfaces including voice-first interfaces are the next frontiers to explore as consumers increasingly look for speed, convenience and security in their banking tasks. Why should banks invest in voice? Because, it is the most natural means of communication and can lead to more personalized interactions.

In the 2013 movie Her, a virtual personal assistant named Samantha quickly evolves from merely competent to awesomely so. Rather than merely scheduling meetings, Samantha becomes a life coach, cajoling the main character, Theodore, a writer, to publish his letters and to move on with his divorce. That movie is science fiction, but those who are attuned to the rapid improvements in artificial intelligence say a version of Samantha (minus the later romantic attachment and singularity) is on the near horizon. For businesses, the promise of AI is that Samanthas will be embedded across all aspects of the organization. Such agents will analyze data, discover patterns over time and then make decisions based on predictive analysis.