Alexa could soon be coming to work with you. At Amazon's annual re:Invent conference, the company revealed its plans to make the voice-activated virtual assistant office-friendly with an Alexa for Business platform, which will come with specific skills for the workplace. Initial features are likely to include apps for teleconferences and data organization, as well as enhanced security layers that could authenticate multiple people in one space. Sources say the company is probably going to announce a new marketplace for the Alexa for Business platform, too. Alexa hit the consumer market three years ago, and now boasts more than 20,000 skills developed by third parties.

A Scottish university reached the final three of a prestigious international competition dedicated to advancing conversational artificial intelligence (AI). A team of Phd students from Heriot-Watt saw more than 100 entries from 22 countries including the likes of Harvard and Princeton to become the only UK institution to be placed in the Alexa Prize. A nine-strong team, named What's Up Bot, won plaudists from judges for their artificial intelligence software named Alana, which can understand and respond to human conversation. The annual competition is organised by online retail giant Amazon and is named after the Alexa voice command system that powers Amazon Echo. The team of PhD students from Heriot-Watt's school of mathematical and computer sciences finished behind fellow finalists, the Czech Technical University and eventual winners, the University of Washington, at a ceremony held in Las Vegas on Tuesday, 28 November.

Inc. AMZN -2.71% wants workers to ask its virtual assistant Alexa to book conference rooms and launch meetings, as the company races against rivals to make the office the next major inroad for voice-recognition devices. Amazon has built a wide lead in the field with its popular at-home Echo speaker, which launched in late 2014. The company is now counting on its new service, dubbed Alexa for Business and available immediately, to spark a surge in voice computing in the workplace. The online retail giant plans to announce the initiative here Thursday at its annual conference for its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit. Even before Amazon made a push into business, RBC Capital Markets predicted that by 2020, Alexa device installations could reach 128 million.

Amazon just dropped its umpteenth Alexa skill, this time for Destiny 2 fans. Already in the tens of thousands, the digital assistant's tricks span shopping, news, smart home controls, pop trivia, kiddie pastimes, and now video games. But while a growing number of regions have access to Amazon's Echo family of smart speakers (including recent additions India and Japan), they're still missing in some spots. Now, it seems Alexa's global expansion is picking up speed, as the digital helper is (officially) heading Down Under. Amazon has announced that Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices will land in Australia and New Zealand in early 2018.

To fans of science fiction, artificial intelligence may remind them of robots like C-3PO, the loquacious but harmless golden droid in Star Wars, or Skynet in the Terminator movies, a calculating sentient computer that subjugated mankind. But AI is more than just a machine with human-level intelligence scientists hope they could one day create. It is a set of algorithms and technologies that is already powering many tasks in everyday life. Get our free ebook on how the Soviet Union became Putin's Russia. Chatbots that converse with you in Yahoo, Facebook and other sites use AI.

The best way to think of these three terms is to think of concentric circles with artificial intelligence-- the concept that came first -- as the largest circle, with machine learning, which came next, in the middle circle and then deep learning in the center. Artificial intelligence, or AI, first got its start in 1956 when a group of scientists came up with the term at the Dartmouth Conferences. The researchers dreamed of a world where computers would have the same characteristics as human intelligence and think like we do. While we are not quite there yet, we do have a number of technologies that certainly do a decent job doing one specific task as well as, or better than, we can. Great examples are face recognition on Facebook, which will allow you back into your account if you are locked out, virtual personal assistants like Siri and websites that suggest items for you to buy, based on your past purchases.

Whether you're a Destiny 2 newbie sampling its free trial or a hardened vet griping about player progress, one thing we can all agree on is the general awesomeness of the game's Ghost AI. The floating intelligence is a tipster, guide, and mechanic all rolled in to one. Activision is so enamoured with the virtual assistant that it's pairing it up with Amazon's Echo speakers. Yes, a Ghost Alexa skill is now available for players that want to bark voice orders at a real-life version of the virtual assistant. With it, you'll be able to ask Alexa to ask Ghost to equip load-outs, scout levels, and join a clan.

Voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa have always invited comparisons to robotic companions and artificially intelligent helpers from science fiction. Perhaps then it comes as no surprise that video game makers are seeing an opportunity in Alexa -- specifically when it comes to Destiny 2. Bungie and Activision are releasing a new Alexa skill Wednesday that makes it possible for players to speak with their Ghost companion verbally through an Echo device. In Destiny, the Ghost is an AI companion that assists a player's character in part by providing useful information and helping them find items. As such, the Ghost Skill is designed to help players with specific tasks, like figuring out what to do next in the game, managing inventory, learning more about the world, and connecting with friends. Players could, for example, say something like, "Alexa, ask Ghost to call for backup," or "Alexa, ask Ghost to equip my most powerful weapon."

We study fairness in collaborative-filtering recommender systems, which are sensitive to discrimination that exists in historical data. Biased data can lead collaborative-filtering methods to make unfair predictions for users from minority groups. We identify the insufficiency of existing fairness metrics and propose four new metrics that address different forms of unfairness. These fairness metrics can be optimized by adding fairness terms to the learning objective. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that our new metrics can better measure fairness than the baseline, and that the fairness objectives effectively help reduce unfairness.

An Amazon Echo, circa 2015, perched on a table beside a lamp. Not pictured: the actual Amazon Echo referenced in the case against James Bates. An Amazon Echo, circa 2015, perched on a table beside a lamp. Not pictured: the actual Amazon Echo referenced in the case against James Bates. Arkansas prosecutors have dropped their case against James Bates, whom they had charged with first-degree murder partly with the help of evidence collected by an Amazon Echo smart speaker.