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 Personal Assistant Systems


What is today's most advanced AI assistant? • /r/artificial

#artificialintelligence

Hi, I've always been into AI and Future technology and even slightly believe in the singularity. I think the best thing that will happen for the average person in the next 10 years due to AI will be the arrival of personal digital Assistants. Much like Siri or Cortana but with more advanced AI functions build in. The ability to learn their "clients?" I know we are a long way off from being able to have a program that can make new command libraries without manually going in and creating them yourself but I don't see why we can't have some sort of chat bot integrated with Cortana and a program similar to how Google decides what ads you see.


LG Reportedly Preparing Amazon Echo Competitor Hub Robot, 2 Other Robots Ahead Of CES 2017

International Business Times

Ahead of CES 2017 this January, South Korea giant LG is teasing about the products and new technologies it would be showing off at the trade show. Based off of new information concerning the Soul-based electronics company, new AI robots could be unveiled at next month's event including one that would serve as a direct competitor to Amazon's Echo smart speaker. Amazon Echo proved to be a smash hit when it was released. Thus, it is not surprising that other companies have since tried to penetrate the market that Amazon established. Google introduced its voice-activated speaker, called Google Home, this year.


Android Circuit: New Galaxy S8 Leaks, Android Biggest Success In 2016, New Google Pixel Problem

Forbes - Tech

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week's Android Circuit includes a new voice for the Galaxy S8, the return of the S-Pen, Pixel power problems, Android's battery win, the shutdown of Cyanogen, WileyFox's quick change to Nougat, a North Korean Android tablet's spyware, and Super Mario Run prepares for its Android arrival. Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here). The Samsung Galaxy S8 could be picking up a new tool named Bixby, a voice-powered digital assistant along the lines of Siri and Google Assistant. Viv Labs is the company behind the technology, and Samsung recently acquired it, so it makes sense for the South Koreans to stake its claim in this space. But will that upset Google?


The Top Enterprise Tech Trends to Watch in 2017

#artificialintelligence

If the business IT market in 2016 was defined by an increased focus on cybersecurity vulnerabilities (including from the Internet of Things), cloud adoption and a shift to hyperconverged infrastructure, what does that augur for 2017? Often, predictions about the year ahead are untethered from the year that was, and do not have much of a connection to underlying trends. The world of enterprise technology likely will not be radically different next year than it was in 2016. However, trends that have been ongoing may accelerate or evolve, as technologies mature and businesses get more acclimated to them. For example, Hardware as a Service may start to take off.


Coevolutionary Latent Feature Processes for Continuous-Time User-Item Interactions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Matching users to the right items at the right time is a fundamental task in recommendation systems. As users interact with different items over time, users' and items' feature may evolve and co-evolve over time. Traditional models based on static latent features or discretizing time into epochs can become ineffective for capturing the fine-grained temporal dynamics in the user-item interactions. We propose a coevolutionary latent feature process model that accurately captures the coevolving nature of users' and items' feature. To learn parameters, we design an efficient convex optimization algorithm with a novel low rank space sharing constraints. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvements in user behavior prediction compared to state-of-the-arts.


Provable Efficient Online Matrix Completion via Non-convex Stochastic Gradient Descent

Neural Information Processing Systems

Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have been restricted to the offline setting where they provide an estimate of the unknown matrix using all observations simultaneously. However, in many applications, the online version, where we observe one entry at a time and dynamically update our estimate, is more appealing. While existing algorithms are efficient for the offline setting, they could be highly inefficient for the online setting. In this paper, we propose the first provable, efficient online algorithm for matrix completion. Our algorithm starts from an initial estimate of the matrix and then performs non-convex stochastic gradient descent (SGD). After every observation, it performs a fast update involving only one row of two tall matrices, giving near linear total runtime. Our algorithm can be naturally used in the offline setting as well, where it gives competitive sample complexity and runtime to state of the art algorithms. Our proofs introduce a general framework to show that SGD updates tend to stay away from saddle surfaces and could be of broader interests to other non-convex problems.


Minimax Optimal Alternating Minimization for Kernel Nonparametric Tensor Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We investigate the statistical performance and computational efficiency of the alternating minimization procedure for nonparametric tensor learning. Tensor modeling has been widely used for capturing the higher order relations between multimodal data sources. In addition to a linear model, a nonlinear tensor model has been received much attention recently because of its high flexibility. We consider an alternating minimization procedure for a general nonlinear model where the true function consists of components in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In this paper, we show that the alternating minimization method achieves linear convergence as an optimization algorithm and that the generalization error of the resultant estimator yields the minimax optimality. We apply our algorithm to some multitask learning problems and show that the method actually shows favorable performances.


Fast Distributed Submodular Cover: Public-Private Data Summarization

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we introduce the public-private framework of data summarization motivated by privacy concerns in personalized recommender systems and online social services. Such systems have usually access to massive data generated by a large pool of users. A major fraction of the data is public and is visible to (and can be used for) all users. However, each user can also contribute some private data that should not be shared with other users to ensure her privacy. The goal is to provide a succinct summary of massive dataset, ideally as small as possible, from which customized summaries can be built for each user, i.e. it can contain elements from the public data (for diversity) and users' private data (for personalization). To formalize the above challenge, we assume that the scoring function according to which a user evaluates the utility of her summary satisfies submodularity, a widely used notion in data summarization applications. Thus, we model the data summarization targeted to each user as an instance of a submodular cover problem. However, when the data is massive it is infeasible to use the centralized greedy algorithm to find a customized summary even for a single user. Moreover, for a large pool of users, it is too time consuming to find such summaries separately. Instead, we develop a fast distributed algorithm for submodular cover, FASTCOVER, that provides a succinct summary in one shot and for all users. We show that the solution provided by FASTCOVER is competitive with that of the centralized algorithm with the number of rounds that is exponentially smaller than state of the art results. Moreover, we have implemented FASTCOVER with Spark to demonstrate its practical performance on a number of concrete applications, including personalized location recommendation, personalized movie recommendation, and dominating set on tens of millions of data points and varying number of users.


Dynamic matrix recovery from incomplete observations under an exact low-rank constraint

Neural Information Processing Systems

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.


Deconvolving Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Collaborative filtering is a popular technique to infer users' preferences on new content based on the collective information of all users preferences. Recommender systems then use this information to make personalized suggestions to users. When users accept these recommendations it creates a feedback loop in the recommender system, and these loops iteratively influence the collaborative filtering algorithm's predictions over time. We investigate whether it is possible to identify items affected by these feedback loops. We state sufficient assumptions to deconvolve the feedback loops while keeping the inverse solution tractable. We furthermore develop a metric to unravel the recommender system's influence on the entire user-item rating matrix. We use this metric on synthetic and real-world datasets to (1) identify the extent to which the recommender system affects the final rating matrix, (2) rank frequently recommended items, and (3) distinguish whether a user's rated item was recommended or an intrinsic preference. Our results indicate that it is possible to recover the ratings matrix of intrinsic user preferences using a single snapshot of the ratings matrix without any temporal information.