The first time Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn't watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha. He paid attention to how she talked to Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and how Twombly talked back. Acero was trying to discern what about Samantha could make someone fall in love without ever seeing her.

She saw the window of opportunity and took it! A British man launched a GoFundMe campaign Tuesday asking viewers to help buy him a new window after his Tinder date got stuck in his old window while trying to retrieve her feces she discarded and had to be rescued by emergency officials. Liam Smyth, a student at the University of Bristol, wrote on the page that he had recently went on a first date with a fellow college student. He and his date had a lovely evening and went back to his residence for a "bottle of wine and a Scientology documentary." Smyth said his date went to the bathroom at one point but came out "with a panicked look in her eye."

The heart of Home is Essential's operating system, Ambient OS. Rubin didn't share much about the new software, but he did share his thoughts about how AI will become the next big operating system. It's a slightly different AI than we see today. Today we see pattern matching and vision tricks and automation for self-driving cars and assistants like Siri or Google Assistant, but I think there's a thing after that that will coalesce into something that's more of an operating platform." Rubin knows his own hardware company can't create the master AI platform alone, which is why his incubator Playground is so important. "We're investing in hardware companies because we think they're essential in training AI," Rubin said. "One of our invested companies is called Light House.

More than 80 per cent of the TV shows people watch on Netflix are discovered through the platform's recommendation system. That means the majority of what you decide to watch on Netflix is the result of decisions made by a mysterious, black box of an algorithm. Netflix uses machine learning and algorithms to help break viewers' preconceived notions and find shows that they might not have initially chosen. To do this, it looks at nuanced threads within the content, rather than relying on broad genres to make its predictions. This explains how, for example, one in eight people who watch one of Netflix's Marvel shows are completely new to comic book-based stuff on Netflix.

Could artificial intelligence be the future of finance? Stock markets are overrun with AI traders, and Swedish banks now use AI chatbots or'virtual consultants' to answer client's queries; a move echoed by Discovery Health, Absa Bank and Lancewood. In 2012, a glitch in the system on the US stock market saw Knight Capital Group mistakenly sell off $440 million worth of shares. We spoke to the big players in finance and AI to find out more. "We are aware of the role artificial intelligence can play in the financial sector, particularly in the stock market," says Michael Kebai, senior manager of Capital Markets at the Financial Services Board (FSB).

Item cold-start is a classical issue in recommender systems that affects anime and manga recommendations as well. This problem can be framed as follows: how to predict whether a user will like a manga that received few ratings from the community? Content-based techniques can alleviate this issue but require extra information, that is usually expensive to gather. In this paper, we use a deep learning technique, Illustration2Vec, to easily extract tag information from the manga and anime posters (e.g., sword, or ponytail). We propose BALSE (Blended Alternate Least Squares with Explanation), a new model for collaborative filtering, that benefits from this extra information to recommend mangas. We show, using real data from an online manga recommender system called Mangaki, that our model improves substantially the quality of recommendations, especially for less-known manga, and is able to provide an interpretation of the taste of the users.

The BBC is making a new kind of theater that works with your domestic voice assistant -- and makes you part of the show. The company's R&D department has collaborated with Rosina Sound to make a radio play that invites you, the listener, to insert your own lines when cued. And, in true British radio tradition, the story (titled The Inspection Chamber) will be a science fiction audio drama-comedy in the vein of Douglas Adams and Franz Kafka. BBC wanted to go beyond the traditional "choose your own adventure" mechanic by interacting with voice assistants. The team building it took inspiration from narrative-driven games like The Stanley Parable and Papa Sangre, both of which lean heavily on audio storytelling.

Apple is pushing its upcoming iOS 11 update for iPhones and iPads before it holds its press event next week. Starting Thursday evening, Apple began sending out notifications that said "Learn about the new Control Center coming in iOS 11" to prepare users for the software update. Apple is set to release iOS 11 this month. The company will hold its press event September 12, in which it will likely reveal the iPhone 8. The event will reportedly take place at 10 a.m PST in the Steve Jobs Theater at the new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, Calif., and could include a bigger preview of iOS 11.

When it comes to smart speakers, Panasonic is hoping users will remember the music and not just the assistant technology. The company's new SC-GA10 is a large, minimally designed smart speaker with Google Assistant inside that also boasts a powerful audio punch. Panasonic demonstrated the speaker at Berlin's IFA trade show in two versions: both had a silver base and one had a black speaker while the other was white. The speaker unit contains a bass speaker and two tweeters offset by about 90 degrees to each other to help fill a room with sound. The speakers can work on their own or be grouped together through a smartphone app for stereo or multi-room audio.

Hacks are often caused by our own stupidity, but you can blame tech companies for a new vulnerability. Researchers from China's Zheijiang University found a way to attack Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants by feeding them commands in ultrasonic frequencies. Those are too high for humans to hear, but they're perfectly audible to the microphones on your devices. With the technique, researchers could get the AI assistants to open malicious websites and even your door if you had a smart lock connected. The relatively simple technique is called DolphinAttack.