It may sound like YouTube has been possessed, but the demonic sounds coming from the clip below are voice commands to access a smartphone's virtual assistant. Researchers have found an attack that uses'hidden voice commands' embedded within clips that lets hackers prompt the assistant to perform a number of tasks. This attack lets hackers make phone calls, use Venmo to transfer money or worse, download malware giving cyberthieves complete control of the handset. Researchers have found an attack that uses'hidden voice commands' embedded within YouTube videos that lets hackers prompt the assistant to perform a number of tasks. They placed an Android 10ft away from the speaker and the'demonic sounds' said'OK Google' Researchers found that hackers are able to embed'hidden voice commands' in YouTube clips to control a smartphones virtual assistant.

We consider the problem of segmenting a large population of customers into non-overlapping groups with similar preferences, using diverse preference observations such as purchases, ratings, clicks, etc. over subsets of items. We focus on the setting where the universe of items is large (ranging from thousands to millions) and unstructured (lacking well-defined attributes) and each customer provides observations for only a few items. These data characteristics limit the applicability of existing techniques in marketing and machine learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose a model-based projection technique, which transforms the diverse set of observations into a more comparable scale and deals with missing data by projecting the transformed data onto a low-dimensional space. We then cluster the projected data to obtain the customer segments. Theoretically, we derive precise necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee asymptotic recovery of the true customer segments. Empirically, we demonstrate the speed and performance of our method in two real-world case studies: (a) 84% improvement in the accuracy of new movie recommendations on the MovieLens data set and (b) 6% improvement in the performance of similar item recommendations algorithm on an offline dataset at eBay. We show that our method outperforms standard latent-class and demographic-based techniques.

Amazon has upgraded its smart assistant - and answered the prayers of Star Trek fans around the world. Traditionally, owners of Amazon's Echo speakers can simply say'Alexa' to trigger it. Now, the firm has added a new feature letting them say'computer' instead, in a nod to the sci fi series. Users can now choose between Alexa, Echo, Amazon and Computer to wake up their smart speaker - letting the smart assistant operate in the same way as Star Trek's computers. Open the left navigation panel, and then select Settings.

A charitable foundation backed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife said Monday it has bought a Canadian artificial intelligence startup as part of a mission to eradicate disease. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not disclose financial terms of the deal to acquire Toronto-based Meta, which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers. Meta capabilities will be unified in a tool made available for free to scientists. Meta artificial intelligence can analyze insights across millions of papers, finding connections and patterns at scales and speeds impossible for humans to match unassisted. In the field of biomedicine alone, thousands of research papers are published daily.

AI developers are making amazing advances. Witness the excitement around AI's progress in search, cancer diagnosis, genomic medicine, autonomous vehicles, Go, smart homes, machine translation, and even lip reading. Progress in such complex problems raises hopes for the development of general-purpose AI that can be deployed in a wide range of intelligent, open-ended interactions with people like computer interface, customer service, planning and advice. It is easy to imagine an enhanced Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa or IBM Watson that engages in conversations with people to answer questions, fulfill commands and even anticipate needs. In fact, unless you watch marketing videos with a very critical eye (like the latest one for Alexa shown below), you might even believe that AI has already reached this point.

Amazon's Alexa platform continues to be the go-to voice assistant not just for the home, but also vehicles. But it looks like the online-retailer's helper in a cylinder was just given its greatest feature ever: The wake word "computer." That's right, you can now pretend you're in the Star Trek universe. The new wake word joins, "Amazon," "Alexa" and "Echo" as things you can yell at the Alexa platform in order to get it to listen to you. Just don't expect the device to help you locate dilithium crystals to get your starship to travel faster than light.

Since Home arrived a few months ago, Google has been regularly adding new features to the compact speaker and its virtual assistant. Today, the company announced that the connected device can now be used to control smart home gadgets from Belkin's WeMo line and Honeywell. This adds more options for controlling lights, switches, thermostats and more with a simple "Ok Google" voice command. Google Home already plays nice with the likes of Nest, Philips Hue and Samsung SmartThings to help you control connected home devices. It also works with audio and TV gear from Vizio, LG and Sony to keep tabs on music and visuals with a hand from Chromecast.

I found these two papers – in of all places the presentation which Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst are presenting in London this weekend, which they claim is preventing them from responding to the can of worms they have opened by publishing a large, non-anonymized database of OKCupid dating profiles. This seems like it may become an important case in research ethics and data privacy. You may want to look into it. I recommend starting with this post by Oliver Keyes, but Vox, Vice and Thomas Lumley have all picked up the story. At any rate, the culprits cite these two papers that look quite good, and the second is the lead in to a whole special issue on cumulative science from Psychological Methods in 2009.

While AI initiatives such as IBM Watson, chatbots and digital assistants have garnered much attention over the past year, the current applications only scratch the surface of the technology's potential. For companies, AI will be used to predict customer needs in near real-time, helping them retain customers. The importance of AI to customer interactions is reflected in Forrester's findings, such as that 37% of companies plan to implement intelligent assistants in the next 12 months, and 35% have their sights on cognitive product launches for customers. Some of the other ways AI will be used going forward include leveraging speech recognition for customer interactions, machine learning for making predictions, image recognition in combination with machine learning, robotics and self-driving cars. Already this year, there are signs that robots in stores could revolutionize the customer experience. However, because AI comes with a number of ethical, political and social issues attached, it will be important for companies to develop a plan and have foundational elements in place as they test and learn, per Forrester.

Apple plans to introduce a much smarter version of Siri this year, leveraging a bunch of machine learning technologies it recently acquired with Turi, Tuplejump, Perceptio, VocalIQ and other AI-focused acquisitions, Digitimes claims. The report seems to suggest Apple plans to introduce these features alongside introduction of a future iPhone, though it is not clear if this will be this year, or the next. However, this makes little sense given Siri is now available across all Apple's platforms – while the capabilities may differ (Siri behaves a little differently on a Mac, for example), the basic tech is similar. That's why I can't imagine new Siri features being introduced as an iPhone exclusive. The report also states other smartphone vendors, "are likely to introduce models featuring AI (artificial intelligence) applications as a means to ramp up market shares in 2017, according to industry sources."