They are in fact such a persistent feature in society that it is not unsurprising to find these stereotypes -- gender, in particular -- still perpetuated in the artificial intelligence bots that have been produced over the years. These gender stereotypes are played out in the roles that these bots are assigned to perform in an industry and their overall personalities. Female bots typically perform more administrative and secretarial roles such as assisting in the completion of routine tasks, scheduling meetings and customer service. Male bots on the other hand, often perform more analytical roles like providing financial advice and paralegal services. Recently, a growing group of companies have started to buck this trend by choosing to create gender-neutral bots instead, sparking discussions in the tech industry on the necessity and consequences of assigning gender (and with that stereotypical traits) to bots in the first place.

At present, predictive analytics is the most used form of AI in enterprise and companies are focusing on innovation, patenting their AI developments at a faster rate than ever before. Join us as we explore the rise of artificial intelligence in six charts including the top investors in AI and the most used AI enterprise solutions. As of June 2016, artificial intelligence received $974m of funding. This year's funding is set to surpass 2015's total and CB Insights suggests that 200 AI-focused companies have raised nearly $1.5 billion in equity funding. AI isn't limited to the business sphere, in fact the personal robot market, including'care-bots', could reach $17.4bn by 2020.

Sony Corp. and Line Corp., Japan's most popular messaging service, are considering joining forces to develop devices powered by artificial intelligence. The companies are exploring opportunities around digital personal assistant technology to co-create a new communication experience, Sony said in a statement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Sony unveiled concept earphones powered by Xperia Agent, a virtual butler that responds to voice commands and head gestures. While Sony's Xperia smartphones are an also-ran in a market dominated by Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai has resisted pressure to shutter the mobile business. He argues it will serve as a springboard into the nascent market for wearable and interconnected devices known as the Internet of Things.

Digital Asset Managers and administrators spend an enormous amount of time and energy on metadata application. It is tedious, thankless work, but absolutely necessary to find assets in the sea of digital petabytes. In the last few years, we've seen a growing number of applications -- Facebook, Ancestry.com, Netflix -- make use of machine learning to help perform specific tasks. Isn't it time your digital asset management (DAM) system did as well?

Artificial Intelligence will remain a high profile topic for years to come and rightfully so: research firms expect the market to grow at a CAGR of 50% to reach $37 billion by 2025. This will generate game-changing productivity gains and transform entire industries. Since the first successful AI experiments in 1955, progress has accelerated dramatically. AI is now broadly used, providing tangible applications for many consumers daily. Examples include Amazon's algorithms making pointed recommendations, Siri answering questions with real-time data from the internet and Watson entering many commercial markets, where AI was absent yesterday.

Google's voice assistant has been released into the wild, making an appearance in several blockbuster smartphones unveiled at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The Siri-like assistant will feature in the latest flagship phones from Nokia, Samsung, Huawei LG, Sony and HTC. It's the first time the artificial intelligence (AI) powered Google Assistant has featured in any non-Google products as the Silicon Valley giant announced it would also come to all phones running the latest Android operating systems. Read more: Blackberry's famous qwerty keyboard is back It's a major move for Google which was late to the show, launching a voice assistant only in October last year for its Pixel phone and Home smart speaker. Meanwhile, Amazon has pioneered its Alexa assistant in the Echo device which first hit countertops in 2015.

One of the best features of the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones is the Google Assistant, Google's own voice-activated assistant that competes with Apple's Siri. With today's announcement however, it looks like Google Assistant will be available on more devices starting this week. The great thing about Google Assistant is that it allows users to talk to their Pixel and Pixel XL phones in a conversational or natural way. Whether it's asking questions, making reservations and appointments, Google Assistant is can do it all. It has proven to be quite an impressive AI assistant and has even been lauded by some as even being smarter than Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

These days, even when I read news about India's state owned air carrier, as "New AI connectivity between cities X & Y", the first connection my (poor human) brain makes is to Artificial Intelligence. Only then it connects to Air India. This is because everyone (in my extended professional circle) is talking of Artificial Intelligence. Though I had done a short elective on AI in my computer engineering days (16 years back), done some basic LISP programming as part of it, had presented a paper on'Genetic Algorithms' in a seminar (again that long ago), and am an avid watcher of Sci-Fi movies around AI (and claim to have understood Matrix the first time I watched it - with subtitles though, ha!), I realize that my knowledge of what AI is, is no better than a layperson (or worse, since half knowledge is more dangerous). This article is an endeavor to sort of unpack AI (and the associated words like ML - machine learning, DL - deep learning) for myself. And publishing it around to benefit others that are in a similar boat. And also to get feedback from others to correct my understanding. Without much dumbing down (or may be with), Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally anything that a computing machine does. Even the basic accountant calculator that does 2 2 4 is'artificial intelligence'. However, we do not consider them as'AI' because of what is called'AI effect' - When we know'how' a machine does something'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. Tools we take for granted (pick any of your favorite app) are all'AI'. Anything that is'eaten by software' can be considered as Artificial Intelligence. And why is everyone talking about it?

We propose a privacy-enhanced matrix factorization recommender that exploits the fact that users can often be grouped together by interest. This allows a form of "hiding in the crowd" privacy. We introduce a novel matrix factorization approach suited to making recommendations in a shared group (or nym) setting and the BLC algorithm for carrying out this matrix factorization in a privacy-enhanced manner. We demonstrate that the increased privacy does not come at the cost of reduced recommendation accuracy.

We investigate a novel cluster-of-bandit algorithm CAB for collaborative recommendation tasks that implements the underlying feedback sharing mechanism by estimating the neighborhood of users in a context-dependent manner. CAB makes sharp departures from the state of the art by incorporating collaborative effects into inference as well as learning processes in a manner that seamlessly interleaving explore-exploit tradeoffs and collaborative steps. We prove regret bounds under various assumptions on the data, which exhibit a crisp dependence on the expected number of clusters over the users, a natural measure of the statistical difficulty of the learning task. Experiments on production and real-world datasets show that CAB offers significantly increased prediction performance against a representative pool of state-of-the-art methods.