Another insight in the Report is that digital transformation is not just about adopting the technologies of the past: 62% of research participants expect to have technology such as virtual advisors in their organisations within the next two years. In addition, 58% expect to start actively investing in technology that powers virtual advisors in the next two years. Today, the digital workplace is no longer just made up of managers and those managed; co-workers collaborating with one another to complete projects; and employees interacting with customers and partners. It's increasingly populated by'virtual employees' who do not exist in a physical sense, but nonetheless play an important role in the organisation. While artificial intelligence (AI) technology is still in its infancy, it is sufficiently advanced to be working its way into companies in the form of virtual assistants, and, in certain industries such as banking, virtual tellers and virtual advisors.

Microsoft now employs over 7,000 Artificial Intelligence (AI) research scientists and development engineers around the world under Microsoft Research (MSR) Executive VP Harry Shum, who shared the company's vision and strategy during the keynote address. The event was clearly intended to promote Microsoft as a thought leader in the developing science and technology of AI, as the execs focused on the company's lofty goals and initiatives, sprinkled with customer and product examples that showcased the company's innovations. Head of Microsoft Research and AI Harry Shum kicked off the intimate event in London. While companies like,, and tend to grab more attention and headlines for their AI efforts, Microsoft has been quietly building an impressive portfolio of scientific advances, products, features and AI cloud services. However, during this and other recent corporate events, Microsoft has been more aggressively positioning itself, and indeed AI, as a force for good, where machines will be used to "amplify human ingenuity", making the world a better place.

Clara Labs, creator of the Clara AI assistant, is announcing a $7 million Series A this morning led by Basis Set Ventures. Slack Fund also joined in the round, alongside existing investors Sequoia and First Round. The startup will be looking to further differentiate within the crowded field of email-centric personal assistants by building in features and integrations to address the needs of enterprise teams. Founded in 2014, Clara Labs has spent much of the last three years trying to fix email. When CC-ed on emails, the Clara assistant can automatically schedule meetings -- reasoning around preferences like location and time.

About a year and half ago I started using a digital assistant to help manage my calendar. Her name was Edi Allen, and she was in the Beta stage of her launch. At first, I was a little skeptical about the potential error rate and overall impact Edi would have on the candidate experience. Working in talent acquisition you find yourself on the phone or in meetings many hours of the day; so, getting some assistance seemed like a conducive solution to optimize my time in arranging these meetings. Initially, I used Edi to schedule time with my colleagues.

Samsung's Bixby used descriptions male and female voices that users considered sexist. Samsung hastily scrubbed the descriptions of male and female voices for its newly launched Bixby voice assistant Wednesday after users pointed out describing a woman's voice as "chipper" and "cheerful" and a male voice as "assertive" "confident" played into well-worn gender stereotypes. "We are constantly learning from customer feedback. We have removed the hashtag descriptions from the Bixby service," Samsung said in a statement to USA Today. Bixby no longer has descriptions of voice options.

Recommendation is the task of improving customer experience through personalized recommendation based on users' past feedback. In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario: the user-item (U-I) matrix of implicit feedback. Even though many recommendation approaches are designed based on implicit feedback, they attempt to project the U-I matrix into a low-rank latent space, which is a strict restriction that rarely holds in practice. In addition, although misclassification costs from imbalanced classes are significantly different, few methods take the cost of classification error into account. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a robust framework by decomposing the U-I matrix into two components: (1) a low-rank matrix that captures the common preference, and (2) a sparse matrix that detects the user-specific preference of individuals. A cost-sensitive learning model is embedded into the framework. Specifically, this model exploits different costs in the loss function for the observed and unobserved instances. We show that the resulting non-smooth convex objective can be optimized efficiently by an accelerated projected gradient method with closed-form solutions. Morever, the proposed algorithm can be scaled up to large-sized datasets after a relaxation. The theoretical result shows that even with a small fraction of 1's in the U-I matrix $M\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$, the cost-sensitive error of the proposed model is upper bounded by $O(\frac{\alpha}{\sqrt{mn}})$, where $\alpha$ is a bias over imbalanced classes. Finally, empirical experiments are extensively carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Encouraging experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark recommendation datasets.

It took longer than Samsung likely expected for the full version of its Bixby virtual assistant to reach customers, but Galaxy S8 users can now get some more use out of their smartphone. Samsung confirmed Wednesday that voice support will roll out to U.S. Galaxy S8 smartphones. The Galaxy S8 had launched earlier this year with a basic version of Bixby that only had minimal features, because of difficulties the assistant had with understanding English. Here's what you can now expect to see from Samsung's Bixby: Samsung has positioned Bixby as an alternative to competitors like Apple's Siri and Google Assistant thanks to its own voice control options. For Samsung, it likely hopes that Bixby-specific features help the assistant stand out from the pack.

As a company, Apple's been known for exploring various side ventures. Its latest project isn't the most high profile, but points to a growing field the company wants to explore further. Apple has launched the Apple Machine Learning Journal, an outlet that focuses on the work Apple engineers are doing with machine learning. In an introductory post on the site, Apple says it wants to highlight the research staffers are doing "using machine learning technologies to help build innovative products for millions of people around the world." The first paper on the site, Improving the Realism of Synthetic Images, focuses on ways to refine the quality of simulated images used in machine learning training to make sure models don't incorrectly process unnecessary details.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. If you love new technology like we do, this scenario might sound familiar: You've found the perfect tech gift for your parents or grandparents, but you're worried they might not use it if it's too complicated to learn. You know they would love the functionality, but how do you make sure it's as easy to use as possible? It's a common dilemma, and often, it comes down to setting up the device in a way that's as straightforward as possible.

Apple just launched a blog focused on machine learning research papers and sharing the company's findings. The Apple Machine Learning Journal is a bit empty right now as the company only shared one post about turning synthetic images into realistic ones in order to train neural networks. This move is interesting as Apple doesn't usually talk about their research projects. The company has contributed and launched some important open source projects, such as WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari, and Swift, Apple's latest programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. But a blog with research papers on artificial intelligence project is something new for Apple.