It has revealed some Stranger Things tie-ins for Halloween, including a sticker pack and an AI-assisted scavenger hunt. If you're in New York City today (October 28th) and want to participate, you just ask Google Assistant "Where is Barb," a reference to the character who just kind of ... disappeared from the show. You can also download a Stranger Things sticker pack with artwork inspired by the show (above). As a reminder, it's a messaging service with a built-in conversational "Assistant" bot that can give you information whether you're chatting with it directly or in a conversation with pals.

Amazon Echo ships for $179.99, and is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa voice service to offer you a wide range of activities and services. Play music Provide information, news, sports scores, weather and more -- instantly. Manage everyday tasks more easily Listen to a book or article Access and control devices related to automation hubs, such as Wink, Insteon, and SmartThings. Each has seven microphones and a beam-forming tech so it can hear you from across the room, even while playing music.

Stock market cheats, A.I. will soon be looking for you. The sheer volume of transactions conducted in financial markets renders market surveillance by regulatory groups difficult, but machine learning and artificial intelligence tools will soon be employed to ferret out cheaters, according to Reuters. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is developing A.I. that it will start testing in 2017 along with its existing surveillance and detection mechanisms. NASDAQ and the London Stock Exchange Group intend to start using artificial intelligence to spot trade irregularities and violation patterns this year. Related: Future AI assistants like Siri could be trained by Joey from'Friends' Reuters reports that financial firms already use artificial intelligence for picking stocks and for monitoring their own firms' compliance.

If pop culture is to be believed, society is quickly heading toward a highly automated future ruled by artificial intelligence. Take Iron Man's trusty sidekick, J.A.R.V.I.S. Within the Marvel franchise, the artificial intelligence system is able to think, act, and feel like a human. The supporting character is even sarcastic and witty -- both trademark human characteristics. In some ways, J.A.R.V.I.S. seems like a better human than most humans. With the release of AI technologies like IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein, in addition to the recent buzz about the "Partnership on AI," which has brought together some of the world's biggest tech companies to advance research in the sector, it might seem like that fantasy is quickly turning into reality.

Low-rank matrix factorizations arise in a wide variety of applications -- including recommendation systems, topic models, and source separation, to name just a few. In these and many other applications, it has been widely noted that by incorporating temporal information and allowing for the possibility of time-varying models, significant improvements are possible in practice. However, despite the reported superior empirical performance of these dynamic models over their static counterparts, there is limited theoretical justification for introducing these more complex models. In this paper we aim to address this gap by studying the problem of recovering a dynamically evolving low-rank matrix from incomplete observations. First, we propose the locally weighted matrix smoothing (LOWEMS) framework as one possible approach to dynamic matrix recovery. We then establish error bounds for LOWEMS in both the {\em matrix sensing} and {\em matrix completion} observation models. Our results quantify the potential benefits of exploiting dynamic constraints both in terms of recovery accuracy and sample complexity. To illustrate these benefits we provide both synthetic and real-world experimental results.

When was the idea of a brand born? Maybe it's always been with us--or even before us. The show has some irresistibly charming pieces on view, from human-sized Starbucks cups to a blinding neon sign reading "Bitch, you're a fan" (a reference to Madonna's Instagram account). But perhaps the most provocative piece is a comprehensive timeline of branding, all the way from 1 BC to today, developed by senior manager Lauren Cascio and partner Matt Miksa. The time line begins with a simple argument: that the world has always been branded.

The latest generation of artificially intelligent robots took centre stage recently at the 2016 World Robot Conference held in the Chinese capital Beijing. But one of the stand out devices was a robot that can actually understand the intricacies of the human brain, and how a human thinks. Xiao I has the ability to analyse human languages as well as a huge amount of data, and can assemble the functions of a human brain. The advanced robot can understand and act on user's instructions by analysing the specific context, thanks to its massive database which has accumulated information concerning daily life and industries for decades, according to an exhibitor at the Xiao I booth. "The top four companies representing the best human-computer interaction technology were voted for at a summit in Orlando the day before yesterday. Xiao I ranks as the top one, and others include Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Echo," said the exhibitor.

The project is an endeavor by the UBS Wealth Innovation Lab in Zurich, led by Dave Bruno. In cooperation with Amazon, the U.S. online warehouse, UBS wants to take its financial expertise to the client, the bank said in a statement on Thursday. The two companies are linking artificial intelligence with digital voice recognition. The laboratory in Zurich also has a project running with nViso, a Lausanne-based software company. The tool – dubbed «Emotionadvisor» – is designed to detect the wishes of customers simply by analyzing their facial expressions.

Between a chat app, two new smartphones and a new in-home avatar, Google's new Assistant is really getting around. While that slow march toward ubiquity continues, it keeps getting smarter, too -- Android Police points out you can now hook up Google Assistant to dozens of new IFTTT recipes, perfect for when you get tired of playing that emoji movies game. Just know this: you can only set up Assistant-enabled IFTTT recipes if you're using a Pixel phone or the (as yet unreleased) Google Home. It was only a matter of time, really. Google Assistant hasn't quite reached its full potential yet, but it's already great at interpreting spoken commands.

Google have snapped up API.AI, a Silicon Valley startup specialising in building tools for natural language understanding in mobiles, web applications and devices. The details of the financial transaction have not been disclosed. Launched in 2014, API.AI quickly recognised the growing trend in companies interested in giving their technology a voice. "We've been constantly impressed by the fast and energetic adoption of the technology from people building conversational interfaces for chatbots, connected cars, smart home devices, mobile applications, wearables, services, robots and more," Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of API.AI, said. The company's API works in three steps.