At CES 2017, plenty of car makers were showing off the latest tech. One of the most interesting developments is that popular digital assistants are making their way onto infotainment systems, with Nissan and BMW demonstrating Cortana. Cortana will be familiar to Windows users as it's built into Windows 10 as well as Windows phones. Although there's no firm date yet when you'll be able to buy a car with Cortana, both Nissan and BMW unveiled their plans at CES to bring the digital assistant to some models in their ranges. Nissan's demo showed the most advanced integration, with Cortana able to tailor preferences and settings based on who's driving, which suggests user profiles will be involved.

If your Google Home device is not responding to your commands, then it's probably due to a dirty mic. Tech junkie and web developer Robby Payne shared his experience this week and advised other users who may encounter the same problem to try this nifty trick in making the Google Assistant-powered speaker receptive again. In Payne's story, which he shared on Chrome Unboxed, his Google Home device stopped responding to his questions and commands one day. The lights atop the speaker would spin upon hearing his daughter's questions, but the device would go out and not provide any response. Despite resetting the AI speaker, it still remained to be unresponsive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.