Facebook's AI assistant, known simply as M, will now pop into your Messenger chat windows to suggest actions it can take on your behalf, the company announced today. The feature is rolling out to iOS and Android users in the US, with a broader expansion around the globe in the coming months. Facebook first began testing this feature in December, and it appears ready to be unleashed on the public. The current system works by analyzing your conversation and looking for key words to trigger M's suggestive capabilities. Those capabilities include sending stickers on your behalf, initiating payment requests through Messenger, calling a ride-hailing app like Uber and Lyft, starting a poll for group chat participants, and sharing your location with others. M will also look for key words that suggest you're trying to make plans with a friend and jump in to help coordinate that.

People can upload a geotagged video, photo or text to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, share their present location on Foursquare or share their travel route using GPS trajectories to GeoLife [49]. A considerable amount of this spatiotemporal data is generated by the activity of users in location-based social networks (LBSN). In a typical LBSN, like Foursquare, users share the time and geolocation of their check-ins, comment about it, or unlock badges by exploring new venues. Many techniques have been proposed for processing, managing, and mining the trajectory data in the past decade [55]. Several other studies try to leverage the spatial data in recommender systems [23]. However, a few works have attempted to model the spatiotemporal behavior of users in LBSNs [5, 6]. Given the history of users' check-ins, the goal is to predict the time and location of This work is supported by ICT Innovation Center, Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

Becoming a cloud-centric technology company is a given nowadays for companies that consider themselves future-ready. The question is hence, not whether a company is operating in the cloud, but what level of sophistication they have reached in their cloud endeavors. This is because the cloud is being enriched by incorporating other emerging technologies, especially machine learning. There is no doubt that contemporary cloud networks will be more intelligent than ever. And companies must harness the power of the intelligent cloud to realize value.

Remember the days when a flight attendant used to be called a stewardess and first class looked like a scene out of the 1970s version of the Playboy mansion? Some might call it nostalgia, while others might leverage charges (metaphorically and literally) of sexism. However, this train of thought got us to thinking: When did secretaries become known as administrative assistants? And, more importantly for our readers, when will secretaries--er, admins--be replaced by AI-powered personal assistants? Many in the media, including us, have speculated about what jobs robots and AI will do in the future.

Make no mistake: We're still probably at least a decade away from any kind of meaningful shift away from the smartphone. Assuming we're still eating at all, I guess.) Yet, piece by piece, the groundwork for the eventual demise of the smartphone is being laid by Elon Musk, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and a countless number of startups that still have a part to play. And, let me tell you: If and when the smartphone does die, that's when things are going to get really weird for everybody. Not just in terms of individual products but in terms of how we actually live our everyday lives and maybe our humanity itself. Here's a brief look at the slow, ceaseless march toward the death of the smartphone -- and what the post - smartphone world is shaping up to look like.

One of the biggest technological revolutions in recent history has been the advent and increased precision of machine learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era of the "emotionally intelligent web." Emotional intelligence has never described machines until now – it was a feat scientists believed outside the realm of possibility. Yet as computerized simulations of intelligent behaviors become more advanced, it is reasonable to say emotionally intelligent machines will disrupt industries in the near future. One such industry is web design.

Artificial intelligence is now touching all industries, from healthcare and advertising to entertainment and ed tech. The retail space in particular is buzzing with news, thanks to plans for an "Amazon Go Store," where shoppers can grab items off shelves and walk out, bypassing a long line at check out. Computer vision algorithms will track the items that were picked and charge the customer's credit card. Other retail giants are taking note too, with eBay partnering with Google Home to demo a shopping concierge, India-based Titan partnering with IBM Watson to drive sales, and Etsy acquiring AI startup Blackbird Technologies in Q4'16. "If you don't have an AI strategy, you're going to die." – Devin Wenig, CEO of eBay, at Shoptalk'17 Among private AI companies, commerce is the No. 3 category for deals since 2012, after healthcare and horizontal applications (startups working across multiple industries).

In 1977, the Eagles released "Hotel California", a song about drugs and the effects an addiction has on people. Putting "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device" in the context of our digital lifestyle today we find a lot of truth. There is a reason why Google provides most of its services for free or why Amazon wants us to have an Echo in every home or why Facebook has become our directory of "friends." What looks pretty convenient is a threat. It is a threat to the end consumers but also a threat to the established economy. And even if we have the choice to check out any time - we will never leave.

University teaching is under the microscope as institutions brace themselves for the first Teaching Excellence Framework, which will accord them gold, silver and bronze status. The biggest developments in university teaching are being driven by technology. The old techniques of talk and chalk are being challenged by lecture capture, flipped learning and decision-making based on data analysis. But technology can have worrying consequences. One (unnamed) university was recently brought under attack by its smart devices – a network including vending machines and light sensors was hacked, wreaking havoc with internet speeds across campus. And then there are the concerns about privacy raised by such developments.

If you look past the hype, existential concerns, and fear that Alexa is a CIA mole, there are some genuinely exciting developments happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Some of these have very specific applications, such as medical imaging, diagnostic capabilities, or satellite imagery recognition. Others, like digital assistants -- or even robots -- are poised to dramatically impact how we live and work on a broader scale. Of course, most of us care about more than just a series of clever tricks. We want AI that does more than the bare minimum -- which thus far has been defined as tedious manual tasks that are a nuisance for humans to complete.