Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social network on Monday saw 1 billion users log in during the course of a single day. "We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, 1 billion people used Facebook in a single day," Zuckerberg said on Thursday afternoon. "On Monday, one in seven people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family. See how the cloud is disrupting traditional operating models for IT departments and entire organizations. "When we talk about our financials, we use average numbers, but this is different.

Microsoft's intelligent assistant, Cortana, is coming to iOS and Android devices, according to a Reuters report published today. But don't expect Siri to step aside right away. The Reuters report, based on interviews with Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, and unnamed sources, is frustratingly vague about the timeframe for the appearance of Cortana in standalone apps on non-Windows platforms. Horvitz told Reuters that technology from an artificial intelligence project codenamed Einstein, "will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame." The standalone apps for iOS and Android are due "later," according to Reuters.

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Research Park has a new company: a spin-off of the UAB and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). MusicStrands uses artificial intelligence techniques to provide people with music recommendations. This initiative is the first and only one to use tags applied to music; tags are labels that people can attach on the music they like for easy retrieval later. Tags also make it easy to discover playlists by keying on interesting tags supplied by other users; in addition, tags can help anyone organize playlists by common features. Users of the MusicStrands website have access to a directory of 3.9 million songs.

Let's get the basics over with," W said to M when they met on a 4-minute speed date. I am fresh from the shower, wrapped in just a towel and smelling of mild herbal soaps (both shower and soaps are required), standing at the door to the tank. It resembles a shower door--knee-high, sliding--and opens to reveal a...READ MORE They talked about where they were from (she hailed from Iowa, he from New Jersey), life in a small town, and the transition to college. An eavesdropper would have been hard-pressed to detect a romantic spark in this banal back-and-forth. Yet when researchers, who had recorded the exchange, ran it through a language-analysis program, it revealed what W and M confirmed to be true: They were hitting it off. The researchers weren't interested in what the daters discussed, or even whether they seemed to share personality traits, backgrounds, or interests.

People are being urged to look up common phrases used in messages received from potential matches online, along with the term "dating scam", to avoid becoming a victim of criminals. A new UK campaign, starting on Sunday, aims to raise awareness about the growing problem of online dating fraud. Date Safe suggests checking the phrases, which could flag whether they are commonly used by scammers. A new report claims the average victim of a scheme is aged 49. It also reveals that money is transferred within 30 days of initial contact with the perpetrator.

As of last month, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are all joining forces to create a new AI partnership called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The collaboration, aside from having a lengthy name, will advance public understanding of AI, and agree on a list of standards for future development. Although there's currently a clear domestic trend, AI has uses that stretch beyond analysing the traffic. A number of companies involved with AI research are looking well beyond family applications. Right now, though, the immediate aim seems to be to get consumers to adopt AI as part of their everyday lives.

The Galaxy S8 may come with a curved screen like the one on this, the Galaxy S7 Edge. The Galaxy S8 is shaping up to be perhaps the most important smartphone Samsung has ever developed, and rumours about the details of its specs continue to emerge. According to The Wall Street Journal the home button may be removed from the front of the smartphone and moved to the back, freeing up space for the screen -- something that Samsung's Chinese rival Huawei did on its P9 smartphone last year. The paper reports that the device, which is expected to be launched later this month, will come with a curved screen as standard, a feature Samsung debuted on its Galaxy S6 Edge and which has proved popular with customers. The S8 will also feature a Samsung-developed voice-powered digital assistant which will apparently be called Bixby, in an attempt to rival Apple's Siri and Google Now.

It's very likely that you'll see Google Assistant on new Android devices beyond the Pixel line, but when... and what about the device you already have? The AI helper might be coming sooner than you think. Google has inadvertently given beta testers an alpha release of its Android search app that enables Assistant support on non-Pixel hardware. It's not working for everyone, but people carrying everything from the Nexus 6P to Alcatel's Idol 4S say they've had success. The software has introductory messages that are clearly targeted at people who previously didn't have Assistant, so it's not an accidental inclusion.

Recent innovations around the autonomous car have shaken up the automotive industry. Manufacturers and their suppliers are all accelerating their work on the cars of the future, both regular human-operated cars as well as driverless or semi-autonomous vehicles. But beyond just issues of autonomy, these cars of the future are undergoing a fundamental shift in human-machine interaction. Consumers today crave more relational and conversational interactions with devices, as evidenced by the popularity of chatbots and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa – and the automotive industry has taken notice. As such, next-generation cars are emerging as advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will power an entirely new automotive experience in which cars will become conversational interfaces between the driver, passengers, the vehicle itself and its controls -- all connected to the IoT and mobile devices we use.

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."