For all those who believe that God Created us, how would you feel if given an option to advise him? Or rather what would you advise him? That is precisely how I feel about a Robo-advisor. A machine created by me is advising me and my fellow beings? If I am so knowledgeable and could feed it to an algorithm, I should start a training class and educate others.

Samsung is set to launch the highly anticipated Galaxy S8 later this month, but new reports suggest the handset's release has been delayed. The smartphone had been expected to hit the shelves on 21 April, but it appears that Samsung has decided to push its plans back by a week. The S8 will instead hit the market on 28 April, according to VentureBeat. The reason behind the apparent delay is unknown, but the company won't want to take any chances in terms of safety or reliability following the Galaxy Note 7 disaster. Samsung itself is yet to announce an official release date for the handset, but numerous leaks over the past several weeks have all pointed at 21 April.

Summary: There are five basic styles of recommenders differentiated mostly by their core algorithms. You need to understand what's going on inside the box in order to know if you're truly optimizing this critical tool. In our first article, "Understanding and Selecting Recommenders" we talked about the broader business considerations and issues for recommenders as a group. In this article we'll cover the five basic types of recommenders and their strengths and weaknesses. Given that Recommenders add 10% to 25% of incremental income to your ecommerce business you need to know exactly how these are working. Optimization will involve fine tuning as well as potentially combining different models.

In August, Sonos announced it was working on Alexa integration. It would let millions of Sonos owners control their music with their voice and do all of the pizza-ordering, game-playing, life-improving things Amazon's voice assistant can do. The move provided a clear indication of where, after 15 years, Sonos sees its future. And yet seven months later, Alexa has 10,000 skills, and Sonos ain't one of them. Gadgets like Amazon's Echo are starting to take over people's living rooms.

Nearly two-thirds of consumers are worried about home IoT devices listening in on their conversations, according to a Gartner survey released Monday. Those jitters aren't too surprising after recent news items about TV announcers inadvertently activating viewers' Amazon Echos, or about data from digital assistants being used as evidence in criminal trials. But privacy concerns are just one hurdle smart homes still have to overcome, according to the survey. In fact, Gartner found that most consumers don't feel they need what smart homes offer. Consumer IoT is still in an early-adopter phase, Gartner concluded from the online survey, which was conducted in the second half of last year in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

"Artificial intelligence appears at last to be coming of age," wrote Richard Windsor, analyst at Edison Investment Research, in a recent 51-page report on the subject. Amazon took a big step in bringing artificial intelligence into the masses two years ago with the introduction of Echo. The multifunctional, voice-activated speaker system is voiced by Alexa. Ask Alexa a question and she'll try to find you an answer, with the support of AI technology. The device can also be used to manage and monitor home utilities.

Amazon's Echo speakers and other Alexa devices can already control your Outlook.com Alexa now supports Office 365's calendar functions, giving you a hands-free way of checking on your next meeting or scheduling that all-important business lunch. This won't see too much use right away when most offices aren't exactly teeming with Echo speakers. However, that's likely part of the point -- this gives the corporate crowd an excuse to bring the Echo into the workplace, even if it's just in private offices (open spaces will likely require multi-voice support).

The ALS algorithm introduced by Hu et al., is a very popular technique used in Recommender System problems, especially when we have implicit datasets (for example clicks, likes etc). It can handle large volumes of data reasonably well and we can find many good implementations in various Machine Learning frameworks. Spark includes the algorithm in the MLlib component which has recently been refactored to improve the readability and the architecture of the code. Spark's implementation requires the Item and User id to be numbers within integer range (either Integer type or Long within integer range), which is reasonable as this can help speed up the operations and reduce memory consumption. One thing I noticed though while reading the code is that those id columns are being casted into Doubles and then into Integers at the beginning of the fit/predict methods.

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

You can't have failed to notice the rise of the AI-powered assistants on phones, from Siri to Google Assistant to Cortana... and there are apparently more on the way in the near future. These apps offer a lot of the same features, though there are some differences too. Below we've taken four of the most well-known digital assistants of the moment and put them through their paces to see where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and to see whether some offer a better level of assistance than others. Apple was the first to put a voice-controlled assistant on a phone and Siri has grown from being a basic interface to your iPhone's functions to something much smarter and astute - and of course it's found its way to macOS now as well. Siri's still happier answering general questions it can look up on the internet rather than anything personal or specific, due in part to Apple's determination to put user privacy first (which means not collecting a load of information from your emails or your location like Google does) - but it can still bring up messages, calendar entries and so on.