The Amazon Echo Show takes the Alexa voice assistant and squeezes it into a cross between a digital photo frame, small TV and smart speaker for something that's more than just an interesting novelty. The Echo Show is effectively what you get if you took an Alexa-integrated Fire tablet, put a powerful speaker on the bottom and framed it with glossy black plastic. The result is a rather monolithic look. For such a small thing it looks fairly imposing, and has split opinion of visitors to my house 50:50 on whether it's attractive, but placed in a corner or on a shelf, it can easily blend in with the surroundings. In fact, when it's not actively doing something, the Echo Show can operate like a smart, internet-connected version of those digital photo frames that quickly went out of fashion.

We study platforms in the sharing economy and discuss the need for incentivizing users to explore options that otherwise would not be chosen. For instance, rental platforms such as Airbnb typically rely on customer reviews to provide users with relevant information about different options. Yet, often a large fraction of options does not have any reviews available. Such options are frequently neglected as viable choices, and in turn are unlikely to be evaluated, creating a vicious cycle. Platforms can engage users to deviate from their preferred choice by offering monetary incentives for choosing a different option instead. To efficiently learn the optimal incentives to offer, we consider structural information in user preferences and introduce a novel algorithm - Coordinated Online Learning (CoOL) - for learning with structural information modeled as convex constraints. We provide formal guarantees on the performance of our algorithm and test the viability of our approach in a user study with data of apartments on Airbnb. Our findings suggest that our approach is well-suited to learn appropriate incentives and increase exploration on the investigated platform.

We talk about artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and machine learning as if they're coming soon, or are just some tech pipe dream. In fact, a special report from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch predicts the global market for AI and robots will be just under $153 billion by 2020, and some industries will experience up to a 30% productivity increase through the use of those technologies alone. That can either terrify you if you've seen too many sci-fi films, or excite you if you consider the upside and benefits it could yield. The reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. There will be disruption – there will be jobs and perhaps even whole industries that see massive displacement from robots and other "intelligent" machines. And that says nothing of the inherent risk associated with creating something capable of logical thinking without emotion. The robots may not rise up and exterminate humanity any time soon, but the development of true AI is closer than you think.

Visit John Keble Primary School in Hampshire and you will see Year Six pupils being captivated by the magic of machine learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us and many of these 10 and 11 year olds and their parents will have used AI assistants such as Amazon's Alexa to play music or turn their lights on and off. Do they understand how these devices work? Experts from IBM visited the school to demonstrate its Watson question and answer computer system which uses machine learning and natural language programming. The children played the Guess Who Bluemix game to illustrate how cognitive technology works.

Holiday shoppers can expect price cuts for numerous electronics, including smart TVs, smartphones and home assistants, for this year's Black Friday. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Samsung and Microsoft are all offering tech deals, with some offers starting before Black Friday and going on through Cyber Monday. Below are the best tech deals the retailers are offering. WALMART - Acer Aspire ES Laptop - $449, save $100. BEST BUY - Amazon - Echo (2nd generation) - $79.99, save $20. AMAZON - Fire 7 Kids Edition Tablets - save $50 when purchasing two (offer available now).

Instead it is about a thoroughly progressive, completely 360 degree view of the traveller and everything that goes into creating special, unique, memorable experiences." Did you get your tickets directly from the ticket office? In today's fast-paced world, finding time to travel to a ticket office and get your tickets is a luxury few can afford. Besides, why bother if you can get your tickets in just a couple of clicks via your laptop or even your smartphone? Indeed, digital travel sales grew rapidly over the last several years, totaling $496.21 billion in 2015. And the number is expected to reach $817.54 billion by 2020.

From swiping right to sexting, modern dating can be a minefield. And when it comes to creating an eye-catching online profile it can be hard to know where to start. Luckily help is at hand for singletons struggling to describe themselves as a new study has revealed the buzz words most likely to help you attract a partner on the net. Dating service Match has scoured the most successful profiles on its site to reveal the'trigger words' most likely to bag you a date. The company analysed the text in the'About Me' section of their website to reveal the words that appear most frequently in its top profiles.

Today we're going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly complicated. Vocabularies are diverse, sentence structures can often dictate the meaning of certain words, and computers also have to deal with accents, mispronunciations, and many common linguistic faux pas. The field of Natural Language Processing, or NLP, attempts to solve these problems, with a number of techniques we'll discuss today. And even though our virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Home, Bixby, and Cortana have come a long way from the first speech processing and synthesis models, there is still much room for improvement.

Machine learning and big data tools similar to those that power popular digital assistants like Alexa and Siri can enable banks and insurance companies to rationalize their operations and cost structures and, longer term, help gain insights about customer needs and identify new sources of incremental revenue. Bank call centers have traditionally been focused on customer satisfaction by responding to routine requests for assistance at minimal cost. They have been run as cost centers, with average call hold time their key metric. Machine learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) help to develop and automate repetitive tasks and flows. Then Predictive Analytics facilitates building models that are not explicitly programmed.

When the cheapest Kindle e-reader drops to $50, it's difficult to resist snagging one on an impulse buy. Appealing to our most reptilian consumer instincts is just how Amazon rolls, and--right on schedule--the retail behemoth-cum-hardware manufacturer is dropping prices across its product lines. Here are all the Black Friday deals for the Amazon Echo, Kindle, and Fire tablet lines. We're also including links to our own coverage of the price-dropped devices (many of which are best in their categories, the Amazon pedigree notwithstanding). Amazon says these deals will end at the stroke of midnight on Monday, Nov. 27.