Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Personal Assistant Systems


Gemini for Google Home will no longer freak out if you ask it how to make a margarita

Engadget

Google has updated Gemini for Home so that it no longer acts like a strict parent when you ask it for cocktail recipes. In the past, you may have encountered a message that says I cannot provide recipes for alcoholic beverages when you ask the AI assistant for a margarita recipe on Google smart home devices, such as the Nest Hub . Now, Google has updated its safeguards to prevent adult users from encountering filters meant for younger ones. Adults will now experience improved availability for general queries, including recipes for age-gated beverages, the company said in the Google Home support page . If Gemini still isn't responding when you ask it for instructions on how to make a cocktail, you may have to check you Parental Control settings and your Gemini for Home response filter settings in the Google Home app.


Differentially Private Sampling from Distributions via Wasserstein Projection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a distribution under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Prior works measure the utility of DP sampling with density ratio-based measures such as KL divergence. However, such formulations suffer from two key limitations: 1) they fail to capture the geometric structure of the support, and 2) they are not applicable when the supports of the distributions differ. To deal with these issues, we develop a novel framework for DP sampling with Wasserstein distance as the utility measure. In this formulation, we propose Wasserstein Projection Mechanism (WPM), a minimax optimal mechanism based on Wasserstein projection. Furthermore, we develop efficient algorithms for computing the proposed mechanisms approximately and provide convergence guarantees.


I'm already dreading Apple's camera-equipped AirPods

Engadget

Well, it seems like those-rumored AirPods with cameras are close to being real, according to the latest report from Mark Gurman . The new earbuds are said to use low-resolution cameras on their stalks to capture low-resolution imagery, which will ultimately be fed to Apple's long-delayed AI Siri assistant. And the more I hear about them, the more they sound like Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, just without the ability to take clear photos and videos. The camera-equipped Airpods are reportedly in Apple's design validation testing (DVT) stage, where workers are using prototypes to test their capabilities. There's no word on when we may actually see them, but according to Gurman they were initially slated to debut as early as the first half of 2026, only to be pushed back by AI Siri delays.


Perplexity opens up its Personal Computer AI assistant to all Mac users

Engadget

Last month, Perplexity sought to better compete with the likes of Claude Cowork and get out ahead of Apple's delayed, generative AI-powered version of Siri by bringing Personal Computer to macOS . The AI assistant was previously only available to those on Perplexity's $200 per month Max plan, but now the company has opened it up to all Mac users. The company says everyone can download the new Perplexity macOS app and use Personal Computer for everyday queries, attachments and dictation. Usage is tied to Pro and Max plans' credit limits, Perplexity noted. Personal Computer can run tasks across local files, other apps, the web and Perplexity's own servers, according to the company.


Apple to pay iPhone owners 250 million settlement over claims of false advertising... see if you qualify

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Doctor's awful mistake led to five days of agony, amputation and eventual death for promising young high school graduate, 18, $100m lawsuit alleges I was so fat I needed two plane seats. Then I lost 208lbs and kept it off for 10 YEARS using'nature's Ozempic' supplement. It was so effortlessly effective... and I could even still eat chocolate! I've discovered the perfect'type' of man that'll drive any woman crazy. The sex is so good, it's ruined every other guy for me: JANA HOCKING Leaked CIA Iran war dossier shreds Trump's boasts... as chilling intel reveals vast missile arsenal Young family were beaming picture of happiness... then affair scandal erupted and three of them were found dead Apple to pay iPhone owners $250 million settlement over claims of false advertising... see if you qualify Why this photo of Princess Charlotte has left Harry'very sad': Friends tell RICHARD EDEN all about his plan for Archie and Lili... and why Meghan has become a'challenge' Panic over SIX Americans who returned to US from deadly rat virus ship... as health officials scramble to find infected all over the world Trump's bombshell private admission sends grim warning to Netanyahu as Israel braces for reckoning Deeply personal reason Aaron Rodgers may have to suddenly retire from NFL... and forgo $15 million for mystery wife Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's battle continues as she demands he pay legal fees for his failed defamation lawsuit days after their shock settlement Billionaire, 70, settles bitter yearslong divorce with ex-wife after shacking up with new fiancée who's almost half his age I survived hantavirus that's spreading on the cruise ship.


Bandits on graphs and structures

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the structural properties of certain sequential problems in order to bring the solutions closer to a practical use. In the first part, we put a special emphasis on structures that can be represented as graphs on actions. In the second part, we study the large action spaces that can be of exponential size in the number of base actions or even infinite. For graph bandits, we consider the settings of smoothness of rewards (spectral bandits), side observations, and influence maximization. For large structured domains, we cover kernel bandits, polymatroid bandits, bandits for function optimization (including unknown smoothness), and infinitely many-arms bandits. The thesis aspires to be a survey of the author's contributions on graph and structured bandits.


Get Microsoft 365 for 30 off--includes an AI assistant and 1TB storage

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft 365 is down to $69.99 for a full year, giving you premium Office apps, 1TB storage, and built-in AI tools across your devices. If you're already using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint --even occasionally--this is one of those upgrades that just makes your setup smoother across the board. Microsoft 365 is currently $69.99 for a 1-year subscription (MSRP $99.99), and it bundles together the apps you actually use with features that go beyond basic document editing. That means your files are accessible across devices, backed up, and easy to share without emailing attachments back and forth. One of the bigger upgrades here is the built-in AI assistant, Copilot .


Exploiting Data Sparsity in Secure Cross-Platform Social Recommendation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Social recommendation has shown promising improvements over traditional systems since it leverages social correlation data as an additional input. Most existing works assume that all data are available to the recommendation platform. However, in practice, user-item interaction data (e.g., rating) and user-user social data are usually generated by different platforms, both of which contain sensitive information. Therefore, How to perform secure and efficient social recommendation across different platforms, where the data are highly-sparse in nature remains an important challenge. In this work, we bring secure computation techniques into social recommendation, and propose S3Rec, a sparsity-aware secure cross-platform social recommendation framework. As a result, S3Rec can not only improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform by incorporating the sparse social data on the social platform, but also protect data privacy of both platforms. Moreover, to further improve model training efficiency, we propose two secure sparse matrix multiplication protocols based on homomorphic encryption and private information retrieval. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that S3Rec improves the computation time and communication size of the state-of-the-art model by about 40 and 423 in average, respectively.


Value-Aware Product Recommendation by Customer Segmentation using a suitable High-Dimensional Similarity Measure

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper presents a novel value-aware approach to product recommendation that simultaneously addresses the high dimensionality and sparsity of user-item data while explicitly incorporating the contribution of each product and user to overall sales revenue. The proposed framework encodes revenue contributions in the user-item matrix and computes customer similarity directly on this basis using suitable distance measures. This enables the segmentation of users according to the revenue-based similarity of their purchase baskets and supports recommendations aligned with profitability objectives. We compare conventional similarity metrics with a novel alternative tailored to high-dimensional contexts and propose three recommendation strategies based on revenue share, product popularity, and expected profit generation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through simulation experiments and a real-world application using the UCI Online Retail dataset.