With the development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives, ethics and bias quickly become main concerns. Both ethics and bias also make implementing artificial intelligence in a practical sense that more complicated. Whose definition of what is ethical are corporations programming their AI systems to default to? It's highly unlikely that there will be a standard answer to this question across companies, industries and countries; especially considering the lack of diversity in the AI design world. The question of ethics, security and privacy is relevant enough, that IEEE (the world's largest organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity) has formed an initiative to examine ethics in the design of artificial intelligence systems.

Very few applications and devices so far are truly intelligent. However, innovation in the field of machine intelligence is high and accelerating rapidly. We're approaching a new age in which there actually will be an intelligent assistant for every part of our lives and, accordingly, the future digital landscape will look very different. When Dag Kittlaus (creator of Siri and founder of Viv) demonstrated Viv's new speech-based user interface in May of this year, we were given a glimpse into a future with radically different dynamics. One of the demonstrations was booking a vacation.

You've seen it in the movies: super smart robots finally come to the conclusion that we humans are making a mess of things. Still think that's the stuff of science fiction? We're building machines that are smarter than we are, that can do our jobs for us, and that we will very soon come to depend on to maintain our technology-saturated lifestyles. With so much going on in the world of AI, we are becoming all but desensitized to the technology. So let's pause for a moment and look at the slightly creepy, but really cool advances taking place in AI today.

Amazon's Echo voice-controlled smart speaker is finally available in the UK, but was the wait worth it? The Echo is one of the first devices with Amazon's voice assistant - a rival to Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana - which allows you to control music playback just by speaking to it and a whole lot more. Echo is three devices in one. It's a voice-controlled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker capable of playing music from Amazon music, a Spotify premium account or a smartphone, tablet or computer connected via Bluetooth. It's also a smart voice assistant called Alexa that's capable of answering queries, setting timers, doing calculations, telling you the weather or what's in your calendar and other bits you might expect from Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.

Word embeddings are a powerful approach for capturing semantic similarity among terms in a vocabulary. In this paper, we develop exponential family embeddings, a class of methods that extends the idea of word embeddings to other types of high-dimensional data. As examples, we studied neural data with real-valued observations, count data from a market basket analysis, and ratings data from a movie recommendation system. The main idea is to model each observation conditioned on a set of other observations. This set is called the context, and the way the context is defined is a modeling choice that depends on the problem. In language the context is the surrounding words; in neuroscience the context is close-by neurons; in market basket data the context is other items in the shopping cart. Each type of embedding model defines the context, the exponential family of conditional distributions, and how the latent embedding vectors are shared across data. We infer the embeddings with a scalable algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent. On all three applications - neural activity of zebrafish, users' shopping behavior, and movie ratings - we found exponential family embedding models to be more effective than other types of dimension reduction. They better reconstruct held-out data and find interesting qualitative structure.

NEW YORK & LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at Money 20/20, Mastercard announced its plans to launch artificial intelligence (AI) bots that allow consumers to transact, manage finances, and shop via messaging platforms. According to research firm Gartner, nearly $2 billion in online sales will be performed exclusively through mobile digital assistants by the end of 2016.1 Mastercard is developing bots for both its merchant and bank partners, which will use chat, messaging and natural language interfaces to communicate with consumers. With the Mastercard bots, partners can have a true dialogue with consumers and provide personalized service, seamless user experience and contextual offers and rewards. Mastercard KAI, the Mastercard bot for banks, will seamlessly extend Mastercard services to customers on messaging platforms and make financial information and decisions part of consumers' everyday lives. In this testing phase on Messenger, Mastercard is partnering with Kasisto, the company that created KAI Banking, the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform, to power branded virtual assistants and smart bots for financial services and is a current participant in the Mastercard Start Path Global program.

"Alexa, what are you wearing?" "Alexa, are you horny?" "Alexa, how much do you weigh?" Alexa -- Amazon's freestanding virtual assistant -- doesn't wear or own any clothes, she can't (physically) feel horny, and she doesn't weigh a single pound. Nevertheless, some people find it normal, and even funny, to pose questions like the above (and other Easter Eggs) to the popular voice-controlled helper. Would we be asking a virtual assistant the same questions if the voice were male? All are female, and all elicit an image of an assistant who is not just a woman, but a woman people can boss around, flirt with, and act inappropriately towards. Compound that with portrayals in the media -- like this 2015 magazine cover showing female robots sitting at typewriters -- and it all starts to feel like a big step backwards rather than one towards the future.

THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some $8.5 billion on deals, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.

The basic idea behind a social network relying on artificial intelligence to improve its services is pretty straightforward. An AI that has access to an immense amount of information that would make "big data" sound like a diminutive could cater more easily to the customers' needs. Moreover, an AI-powered social network would be able to anticipate user actions, a fact that would ultimately improve people's perception about the product (or platform). The world's biggest social network can't miss a chance to tell everyone just how much better its products and apps will be thanks to AI. Artificial intelligence is on the company's agenda on a regular basis, and advancements are developed or announced periodically, either at Facebook's own events or other major conferences. In this post, we'll take a look at the recent highlights in terms of AI, as far as Facebook is concerned.