Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week's Android Circuit includes Samsung's efforts to spoil MWC, new images leaked of the Galaxy S8, asking if the new Nokia handsets are worthy of the Nokia name, a hands-on review of the Nokia 5, the LG G6 design, Huawei's new camera technology, the return of the BlackBerry keyboard, and the designer of the Psion PDA returning with an Android dream machine. Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here). Although it had previously declared that it would not be announced the Galaxy S8 at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the South Korean company announced when it would be announcing its new flagship. It looks like a tactical move to remind consumers not to fall in love with the new devices from MWC until it can consider Samsung's latest: But today's news about the Galaxy S8 launch wasn't about reassuring the public. It was about taking away some of the momentum that the S8's rivals could gain from Mobile World Congress.

Here's a quick story you've probably heard before, followed by one you probably haven't. In 1979 a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to Xerox PARC, the legendary R&D lab in Palo Alto, California, and witnessed a demonstration of something now called the graphical user interface. An engineer from PARC used a prototype mouse to navigate a computer screen studded with icons, drop-down menus, and "windows" that overlapped each other like sheets of paper on a desktop. It was unlike anything Jobs had seen before, and he was beside himself. "Within 10 minutes," he would later say, "it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday." As legend has it, Jobs raced back to Apple and commanded a team to set about replicating and improving on what he had just seen at PARC. And with that, personal computing sprinted off in the direction it has been traveling for the past 40 years, from the first Macintosh all the way up to the iPhone.

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce platforms.

The feature, which was first showcased at Google I/O last spring, was initially made available only to Google Pixel phone users, but as of this week, Google announced that many more Android users will be enjoying Google Assistant. The feature began rolling out to Nougat and Marshmallow devices the week of February 26 and continues to become available to more users every day. If you have an Android device and want to get Google Assistant working on it but aren't sure how, we've put together a comprehensive guide of everything you need to know to activate and begin using Google Assistant on your device. Google's virtual assistant has begun rolling out to more users this week. Find out if your device is compatible.

Amazon's Alexa can be used for a variety of home tasks, but could it make your phone calls? Recode reports that Amazon is developing Alexa-based devices that would have the ability to be used as a phone-like intercom. The devices are still in beta and details on functionality -- for example, how the devices would pair with phones -- are unclear, but Recode says an announcement will be coming in the next few months. While details on the new devices remain scant, they fit into Amazon's teased and stated goals for Alexa and the Echo as a platform. Thanks to devices like the Echo and Echo Dot, Amazon has gotten the virtual assistant into homes and made its use more intuitive, but the online retailer's next planned steps are to integrate it more into your daily routine.

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Amazon's Echo is a robot that sits in your house and listens. The virtual personal assistant can be summoned into action by saying its name, Alexa, and will then act on commands, like ordering a dollhouse and cookies when asked to do so by a too-clever kindergartener. And because it works by listening, Alexa is an always-on surveillance device, quietly storing snippets of information. Which has placed a particular Echo unit in an uncomfortable role: possible witness to a murder. The night before, Bates invited friends, including Collins, over to watch the football game, and after Bates reported Collins death, police collected some evidence of struggle from the scene.

He's been there for three weeks now -- though he is quick to point out that he was out of the office for one of them so it's really only been two weeks -- but that's not stopping Quartz from launching one of the Bot Studio's first experiments, a Twitter bot to help attendees of the NICAR conference. People going to #NICAR17 can ask a Twitter bot. Keefe says the Bot Studio, which is funded by a $240,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information. Keefe joined Quartz after spending 16 years at WNYC. We spoke about the lessons he learned from public radio, his goals for the Bot Studio, and what it'll take for bots to catch on.

That's a phrase none of us has uttered yet, but the day when voice assistants go beyond helping us simply complete transactions to facilitating deeper human-to-human relationships is rapidly approaching. In fact, Amazon and Google are rumored to be adding voice calling to Echo and Google Home. While today people might ask Alexa for their bank balance, voice is ultimately about human conversation, which might lead you to doing something like connecting with your financial advisor. The news that Amazon and Google are working on adding voice calling to Alexa and Google Home isn't a harking back to simpler times, nor is it a concerted effort to kill the home landline. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that while voice assistants are great at completing transactional tasks, people still want to have human conversations, such as getting someone's opinion or walking through a complex purchase.

Without a doubt, 2016 was an amazing year for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) awareness in the press. But most people probably can't name 3 applications for machine learning, other than self-driving cars and perhaps their voice activated assistant hiding in their phone. There's also a lot of confusion about where the Artificial Intelligence program actually exists. When you ask Siri to play a song or tell you what the weather will be like tomorrow, does "she" live in your phone or in the Apple cloud? And while you ponder those obscure question, many investors and technology recommenders are trying to determine whether,,, or will provide the best underlying hardware chips, for which application and why.