Even though research and advisory firm Gartner says 30% of web browsing will be screenless by 2020, Purna Virji, senior Bing Ads PPC training manager, told marketers at the Inbounder on Monday (May 22) not to panic. Pointing to a Cortana video in which women plan a 30th birthday party in Las Vegas without any landing pages and instead rely on digital assistants to do the heavy lifting, Virji noted this is where consumers are headed, but she also reassured the Inbounder audience while there will be a shift away from screens, voice won't kill screens – just like mobile didn't kill desktop. According to Virji, we are training artificial intelligence (AI) to be human-like so that it looks at something, understands it, recognizes it and responds back – like Microsoft's how-old.net, or the #HowOldRobot, which is learning to understand faces and tell users how old they look, and Xiaoice in China, a social assistant on networks like Weibo and Touchpal – and who Virji said is designed to be users' friend. Like, say, if you tell Xiaoice you broke up with your boyfriend, she'll put you on a 30-day breakup plan, Virji said. As a result, Xiaoice has 40 million active monthly users – and 25% have told her they love her.

In the preference completion problem, there is a pool of items and a pool of users. Each user rates a subset of the items and the goal is to recover the personalized ranking of each user over all of the items. This problem is fundamental to recommender systems, arising in tasks such as movie recommendation and news personalization. A common approach is to first estimate the ratings through either a matrix completion estimator or a neighborhood-based method and to output personalized rankings from the estimated ratings [13, 26, 17, 2]. Recent research has observed a number of shortcomings of this approach [25, 15]; for example, many ratings-oriented algorithms minimize the RMSE, which does not necessarily produce a good ranking [5]. This observation has sparked a number of proposals of algorithms that aim to directly recover the rankings [25, 15, 16, 19, 18, 8]. Although these ranking-oriented algorithms have strong empirical performance, there are few theoretical guarantees to date and they all make specific distributional assumptions (discussed in more detail below). In this paper, we consider a statistical framework for nonparametric preference completion.

Line Corp. is the most popular app in Japan--and #TalkingTech pays a visit to find out why it's so popular. TOKYO -- Imagine a world where everyone you know is on the same social network, sending direct messages to one another, sharing photos and making free phone calls. And it's not called Facebook. In Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, that social network/messenger app is probably Line, an app that's available in the United States and most other countries, but dominant in Asia, where over two-thirds of its audience is based. At 214 million monthly active users, Line is dwarfed in size by the Facebook social network and the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp chat applications, which each have over 1 billion users.

Last month, IKEA launched its own line of low-cost smart lighting, called TRÅDFRI, and up until now, users have had to rely on a remote control or a proprietary app to use the product. Today, the Swedish retailer announced that their IKEA Home Smart products will respond to voice commands from Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant starting this summer. Additionally, the product line will integrate with Apple's HomeKit. "With IKEA Home Smart we challenge everything that is complicated and expensive with the connected home. Making our products work with others on the market takes us one step closer to meet people's needs, making it easier to interact with your smart home products," said IKEA Home Smart's business leader Björn Block.

Everything from a new accessibility toolkit for smart cities, to an AI assistant, to a patrol car prototype were part of Microsoft's presentations at Smart Cities NYC '17. First on the agenda was Microsoft's announcement about its Smart Cities for All Toolkit to help city officials and urban planners design cities with inclusive features to assist people with disabilities. The toolkit was developed by G3ict and World Enabled as part of the Smart Cities for All initiative to give city leaders a strategic guide to benefit all citizens, including the approximately 1.2 billion people in the world with disabilities. The toolkit is the first step toward what Microsoft plans to be a long road to help cities become more inclusive. It's comprised of four new tools to address priority challenges and alleviate the top barriers for disabled individuals in smart cities. "The toolkit is meant to be guidance for city leaders to think about how to make the business of becoming a smart city accessible to everyone. They don't know where to start," said Kathryn Wilson, director of cities solutions worldwide public sector for Microsoft.

Mark is a senior Salesforce consultant and developer at Cetrix Cloud Services. He headed the IT team at Cetrix for six years, with administration and development of Salesforce as its main responsibility. He also has 18 years of IT experience in software engineering and system integration behind him. He enjoys helping startups and non-profit organizations select and deploy the right technology for their specific needs.

From picking our favorite restaurants to predicting weather and correcting global food shortages, artificial intelligence is already augmenting everyday life. Firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has often felt external – something happening out there. In reality, AI is a huge part of our everyday lives. We just don't recognize it. Bank alerts of suspected fraudulent charges, smartphone notifications to exercise, Siri or Cortana's ability to recognize voices – are all examples of AI. "Artificial intelligence is basically where machines make sense, learn, interface with the external world, without human beings having to specifically program it," said Nidhi Chappell, director of machine learning at Intel. AI improves lives in many other areas too.

Founded in 2011, MindMeld helps businesses to build conversational interfaces with cloud-based services. MindMeld had previously raised $15.4 million in venture capital financing from IDG Ventures, GV, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Intel Capital, among others. "With MindMeld, we will enhance our Collaboration suite, adding new conversational interfaces to our collaboration products starting with Cisco Spark," Cisco's head of corporate development, Rob Salvagno, said in a blog post. Cisco says that the MindMeld team will form the company's Cognitive Collaboration team, a move that immediately evokes the aesthetic of IBM Watson's cognitive computing group.

We've been hearing a lot about how Google Home and Amazon Echo can control our smart appliances and devices, but for many of us, they're still out of reach. Spending a couple hundred dollars on smart light bulbs or thousands on a new oven aren't exactly impulse buys, especially if we're just buying them to try out voice control. Thanks to IKEA, just about anyone can install smart lighting in their homes and manage them with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. The Swedish furniture company announced in a press release that you will soon be able to control its affordable line of smart lights with the smart speakers and assistants you already have. IKEA's bulbs offer a no-frills approach to smart lighting.

Google gave us a look at the future of its products and services today at its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California. There were a number of key announcements that will help shape the future of Android and other major platforms, including a new application called Google Lens, changes to Google Home, and some Google Photos additions. The mobile giant also presented a couple of features we should expect to see in the upcoming Android O update, but stopped short of showing any new hardware. Here are the biggest announcements from the opening day keynote. Android O still doesn't have a name, but we at least know a few of the features it will launch with. The next version of Android will get Picture-to-Picture, an automatic multi-window feature that will let you continue to watch videos or read an article while you browse through the OS.