For Amazon, this was a week of war and peace. On Tuesday, Google said it would cut off Amazon's Fire TV streaming devices from YouTube, starting on January 1. Google also immediately began blocking YouTube from Amazon's Echo Show smart screen device, marking the second time it has done so. The search giant said it was responding to unfair treatment by Amazon, which won't sell Google devices through its online store and won't bring Amazon Prime Video support to Chromecast. The following morning, Amazon made good on its plans to launch a Prime Video app on Apple TV. The new app, first announced back in June, is a full endorsement of Apple's platform, supporting 4K HDR video and unique tvOS features like Siri search and TV app aggregation.

The yes-or-no swipe is the de facto way to find matches in dating apps these days, but it has its limits. Do you really want to sift through dozens of people just to find the one or two that share your interests? Even those sites that do offer search tend to focus just on basics like age or relationship goals. OKCupid, at least, thinks it can do better. It's launching a Discovery feature that lets you search for people who share similar interests.

In this Zetabyte Era, the abundance of information calls for personalization systems to ease the navigation of users. Among these systems, recommenders are becoming mainstream, and are used by major service providers such as Facebook, Amazon and Netflix. Some recommenders make use of the content of the items: these include popularity-based, knowledge-based or demographic-based schemes [8]. Others are content-agnostic: these are mainly collaborative filtering (CF) [14], [44] schemes, and are predominant today for they achieve good recommendation quality without requiring any prior knowledge of the content of the items recommended. Recommenders typically collect user preferences using explicit feedback [32], such as numerical ratings (star ratings in Imdb, Netflix, Amazon), binary preferences (likes/dislikes in Youtube), or unary preferences (retweets in Twitter). Yet, relying on explicit feedback raises issues regarding feedback sparsity (in systems where the item catalog is large, users tend to give feedback on a trace amount of those items, impacting the quality of recommendations [8]), and limited efficiency for recommending fresh items in reaction to recent user actions [37]. A few implicit recommenders have been proposed to answer those shortcomings.

Recommenders have become widely popular in recent years because of their broader applicability in many e-commerce applications. These applications rely on recommenders for generating advertisements for various offers or providing content recommendations. However, the quality of the generated recommendations depends on user features (like demography, temporality), offer features (like popularity, price), and user-offer features (like implicit or explicit feedback). Current state-of-the-art recommenders do not explore such diverse features concurrently while generating the recommendations. In this paper, we first introduce the notion of Trackers which enables us to capture the above-mentioned features and thus incorporate users' online behaviour through statistical aggregates of different features (demography, temporality, popularity, price). We also show how to capture offer-to-offer relations, based on their consumption sequence, leveraging neural embeddings for offers in our Offer2Vec algorithm. We then introduce BoostJet, a novel recommender which integrates the Trackers along with the neural embeddings using MatrixNet, an efficient distributed implementation of gradient boosted decision tree, to improve the recommendation quality significantly. We provide an in-depth evaluation of BoostJet on Yandex's dataset, collecting online behaviour from tens of millions of online users, to demonstrate the practicality of BoostJet in terms of recommendation quality as well as scalability.

The development of artificial intelligence gathers pace. Every day you can read some new information about chatbots, voice recognition, virtual assistants, robots, etc. More artificial intelligence software get on your phones and computers. However, are these technologies worth the money you pay? Though many scientists, professors, and entrepreneurs talk about how dangerous artificial intelligence can be, AI is still in the focus of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies.

Two tech giants are in a messy streaming video fight right now, leaving consumers squeezed in the middle. Google on Tuesday said it would pull its YouTube apps from Amazon's Echo Show, which is an Alexa-powered device with a screen, and Fire TV starting next month. Why? Google pointed a finger at Amazon, which hasn't been selling some products from Google and Nest, which is also owned by Google's parent company. Amazon also doesn't allow Google products to have access to its Prime Video streaming service, the statement said. "Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest's latest products," the company said in a statement to The Post. "Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and Fire TV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon."

If you've become fond of Alexa, a new pair of wireless headphones lets you take Amazon's digital assistant with you on the run -- literally. "When (Apple co-founder) Steve Jobs announced the iPod, the pitch was: A thousand songs in your pocket. Now, it's 20 million songs at the sound of your voice," said 66 Audio CEO and founder Kristian Kay. "You can ask Alexa to play you any song from multiple services ... and instantly, without ever touching your phone, you have this unlimited jukebox where you now can listen to any music that you want, on demand." This is just the latest evolution of Alexa-enabled technology.

File photo: People are silhouetted as they pose with mobile devices in front of a screen projected with a Youtube logo, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014. Google is pulling YouTube from Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV devices over the online retailer's refusal to carry certain products from the search company. In pulling the YouTube support, Google said its own products, Google Home and Chromecast, are not available for sale on Amazon. Last month, the e-commerce giant also stopped selling certain products from Nest, a company under Google's parent Alphabet. "Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and Fire TV," Google said in an email on Tuesday.

A computer keyboard lit by a displayed cyber code is seen in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017. The concept of an AI'god' may seem outlandish, but a former Google and Uber engineer is touting the idea of a high-tech'deity' as a way to improve society. Think about how much we depend on Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa today. We ask the AI bot for directions, to check on the weather, and to dim the lights in our house. Few of us know the complex engineering required to make this happen, we just trust it will work.

Google is using YouTube as leverage over Amazon to try and force the world's largest retailer to sell its Home smart speakers, Chromecasts and Nest products. Google has pulled official support for YouTube from Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV devices, meaning that owners can no longer access the video site through a YouTube app. The quarrel originally became public in September when Google pulled YouTube access from the new Echo Show for "violating terms of service" saying that Amazon's implementation of YouTube blocked what Google considered critical features. Now it appears to revolve around Amazon's unwillingness to sell certain Google products. Google said in a statement: "We've been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other's products and services. "But Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest's latest products.