Criminals can use shortcomings in popular dating apps, including Tinder, Bumble and Happn, to see users' messages and find out which profiles they've been viewing. As well as having the potential to cause major embarrassment, the exploits could lead to dating app users being identified, located, stalked and even blackmailed. The researchers, from Kaspersky Lab, studied the Android and iOS versions of Tinder, Bumble, Happn, OKCupid, Badoo, Mamba, Zoosk, WeChat and Paktor. They said it was "fairly easy" to find out a user's real name from their bio, as a number of dating apps allow you to add information about your job and education to your profile. Using these details, the researchers managed to find users' pages on various social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as their full names and surnames, in 60 per cent of cases.

A new startup is making a Google Assistant-powered touchscreen that functions as a smart home hub. Called Lynky, the new device functions like a Google Home speaker with its own touchscreen display and it will be able to control users' smart home device. Lynky can sit on top of a desk powered by a USB cable or can be mounted on a wall. Lynky is powered by Google Assistant, the very same digital assistant that's on the Google Home smart speakers and on Android smartphones. Users will be able to give out voice commands and use Lynky to search the web and play music, just like the Google Home.

For many founders the road to raising capital usually takes months, if not years, but for Flamingo founder Dr Catriona Wallace the latest part of her journey took just 12 minutes. The artificial intelligence fintech startup, which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange through its holding company Cre8tek, raised $5.1 million last month via a share placement to new and existing institutional, professional and sophisticated investors. The oversubscribed round closed after just 12 minutes, with $10 million in bids vying for the 128.1 million in shares that were on offer for 4c each. "There's recently been a lot more interest and conversation [in Australia] around artificial intelligence, and this is reflected in the success of this raise," Wallace tells StartupSmart. "Like all startup founders I know that raising money is always a difficult task -- we were very pleased that the $5.1 million was oversubscribed and mainly our feeling was of happiness and confidence. It gives us a really significant runway into 2018 to prove our next key milestones."

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act bars companies from collecting audio recordings from kids under 13 without their parents' permission. However, that raises concerns about voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Google Assistant: is it legal for under-13s to use voice commands, given that there's rarely (if ever) a permanent recording to put them at risk? According to the Federal Trade Commision, the answer is yes... within limits. The agency has stated that it won't pursue enforcement action against companies simply because they let kids issue voice commands. So long as the firms only hold on to recordings for a brief moment and use them solely for voice commands, they'll usually be in the clear.

We consider matrix completion for recommender systems from the point of view of link prediction on graphs. Interaction data such as movie ratings can be represented by a bipartite user-item graph with labeled edges denoting observed ratings. Building on recent progress in deep learning on graph-structured data, we propose a graph auto-encoder framework based on differentiable message passing on the bipartite interaction graph. Our model shows competitive performance on standard collaborative filtering benchmarks. In settings where complimentary feature information or structured data such as a social network is available, our framework outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

While Samsung and Apple are busy preparing their Amazon Echo rivals, LG has launched a new Bluetooth speaker that banks on levitating technology to capture the attention of consumers. The LG PJ9 is a portable speaker that utilizes magnetic technology to keep it floating in the air for hours, and it is now available in the electronics company's home country. On Tuesday, LG officially launched the PJ9 Bluetooth speaker in South Korea, just two months after the product made its debut in the U.K. back in August. The company proudly shared that what makes its speaker noteworthy is the 360 degrees audio it provides thanks to its unique design and floating technology. LG says the PJ9 is capable of delivering good sound quality because the speaker itself is floating above the Woofer Station, as per Korea Herald. LG's Bluetooth speaker has two components: an egg-shaped speaker and a large docking base, which works as a subwoofer and charger.

Google Assistant is quickly becoming the most indispensable tool in our lives. With calls, reminders, routines, voice recognition, and a variety of devices, Google Assistant is like a member of the family, always ready to help when called upon. But that doesn't mean it doesn't know how to have fun. An update rolling out to Google Assistant today unlocks more than 50 new games, activities, and stories just in time for the end-of-the-year holidays. While they're specifically designed for families and kids, anyone can join in on the fun, which includes popular games such as musical chairs, trivia, and freeze dance.

There's no question that kids like talking to smart speakers, and Google knows it. As promised, the search firm is adding over 50 child-oriented activities to Google Assistant to make sure your Home speaker (or really, any Assistant-capable device) can entertain the younger crowd. It can orchestrate trivia games, start a round of musical chairs, tell a story or even help with homework. Not surprisingly, this includes a few branded experiences: you can ask the Assistant "what's my Justice League superhero?" The games are rolling out right now, and Google is quick to tout that these are helped by Assistant's ability to recognize individual voices and link them to specific accounts (including kid-specific accounts). Yes, this ultimately serves as a selling point for Home speakers, but it's arguably necessary if smart speakers are going to see broader adoption.

Devices like Amazon's Echo and Google Home can usually deal with requests from a lone person, but like us they struggle in situations such as a noisy cocktail party, where several people are speaking at once. Now an AI that is able to separate the voices of multiple speakers in real time promises to give automatic speech recognition a big boost, and could soon find its way into an elevator near you. The technology, developed by researchers at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was demonstrated in public for the first time at this month's Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies show in Tokyo. It uses a machine learning technique the team calls "deep clustering" to identifies unique features in the "voiceprint" of multiple speakers. It then groups the distinct features from each speaker's voice together, allowing it to disentangle multiple voices and then reconstruct what each person was saying.

If you are someone who likes to keep a tab on all the latest dating trends, you would have probably come across the term "submarining," a nasty dating trend in the millennial world that can be considered the next step to "ghosting." To understand what submarining is, you will have to wrap your head around ghosting, which refers to the date disappearing from your life without any prior warning. This means that you could be getting close to a potential boyfriend or girlfriend, but that significant someone suddenly drops off the face of the earth. He or she will end all modes of communication with you, including calls, texts, and emails. You would end up getting blocked on all social media platforms, with your date, essentially turning into a ghost you once knew. Needless to mention, most cases of ghosting happen in relationships which started online or via dating apps like Tinder.