Virtual marketing assistant Kit CRM today announced the launch of its chatbot on Facebook Messenger. This will be its third platform and comes three months after Kit became one of the first companies to announce an integration with Facebook's conversational platform. Now, any of the more than 900 million monthly app users will be able to have access to a virtual employee right at their fingertips. The idea in bringing this marketing assistant to Facebook Messenger is to enable merchants without marketing support to more easily manage their online marketing promotions on Facebook and Instagram. This assistant offers a more user-friendly interface, instead of asking them to sort through ad-serving networks and interfaces.

In the event of a c-section, if a robot suggested who should perform it, would you listen? Ninety percent of the time, nurses and physicians did. A robot programmed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) suggests where to move patients and who should perform caesarian sections. The team from CSAIL thinks robots are most effective in helping with one of the most "complex" tasks in the labor ward of the hospital: scheduling. "The aim of the work was to develop artificial intelligence that can learn from people about how the labor and delivery unit works, so that robots can better anticipate how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way--and maybe even help by collaborating in making challenging decisions," says MIT professor Julie Shah, senior author on two papers based on CSAIL's research.

Conventional collaborative filtering techniques treat a top-n recommendations problem as a task of generating a list of the most relevant items. This formulation, however, disregards an opposite - avoiding recommendations with completely irrelevant items. Due to that bias, standard algorithms, as well as commonly used evaluation metrics, become insensitive to negative feedback. In order to resolve this problem we propose to treat user feedback as a categorical variable and model it with users and items in a ternary way. We employ a third-order tensor factorization technique and implement a higher order folding-in method to support online recommendations. The method is equally sensitive to entire spectrum of user ratings and is able to accurately predict relevant items even from a negative only feedback. Our method may partially eliminate the need for complicated rating elicitation process as it provides means for personalized recommendations from the very beginning of an interaction with a recommender system. We also propose a modification of standard metrics which helps to reveal unwanted biases and account for sensitivity to a negative feedback. Our model achieves state-of-the-art quality in standard recommendation tasks while significantly outperforming other methods in the cold-start "no-positive-feedback" scenarios.

Artificial intelligence is on the lips of every influencer in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg is building his own artificially intelligent butler, and Elon Musk recently launched an AI company. But AI is on the rise, and it's already driving change in retail and consumer businesses. Several aspects of AI have advanced significantly in recent years, particularly speech recognition and text understanding. Speech recognition, also known as voice understanding, interprets spoken words and matches them with concepts, tasks, and people.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant -- you may think you're pretty familiar with these products today, but that's nothing compared to how close you'll be with them if all goes as planned for tech titans who are developing them. Many are looking to voice technology to help us finally move most functions of our lives away from the mouse and keyboard, past the touchscreen and beyond. Sure, right now, using voice assistants can be a pretty frustrating experience -- particularly for a technology that's been on mainstream devices for years. But developers are hard at work improving them so that they can work reliably from your home, your car and, well, anywhere you are.

At x.ai, we are building an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant. The software will schedule meetings for our customers automatically without subjecting them to the typical back and forth over email negotiating when and where to meet someone. We are looking for a smart, self-motivated, and enthusiastic individual to join us on the journey in building the artificial intelligence of the future. You'll get to work side by side with a small team of serial entrepreneurs moving at breakneck speed.

At the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Prague, a Harvard-based artificial intelligence system won the Camelyon16 challenge, a competition comprised of participants introducing their individual AI systems and its ability to facilitate automated lymph node metastasis diagnosis. Referred to as PathAl, the computing system identifies cancerous cells through a mechanism referred to as deep learning--an algorithmic technique that accumulates copious amounts of unstructured data and organizes it into clusters, before analyzing it for patterns. Deep learning is predominately utilized in speech recognition systems like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. According to one of the challenge's organizers, Jeroen van der Laak of Radboud University Medical Center in Netherlands, the technology featured in the competition went "way beyond" his expectations, as the AI's accuracy proved strikingly close to that of human beings. In addition, van der Laak said AI technology has the propensity to intrinsically redefine the way histopathological images are handled in the medical community.

This Chrome extension uses FP-Growth to surface recommended products from other users who have upvoted the product you are looking at. This is similar to how Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" recommendations work. Learn how to build and implement your own collaborative filtering recommendation engine today.

Artificial Intelligence is the latest hotness. We've heard how bots are going to be the new apps allowing natural conversational interfaces. Siri, Cortana and Google Now are no longer a gimmick and are becoming more useful every day. Machine Learning sits behind artificial intelligence and on the surface it may seem like a deeply technical, scientific topic. We are here to tell you that it is more accessible than you think.

One of the most interesting features of the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 is the beefed-up inking capability. Particularly when combined with Cortana, which can turn handwriting into actionable tasks such as reminders. It's a neat feature, and you don't have to be a stylus-wielding user to take advantage of it. Even someone with a keyboard and mouse can use Cortana's smarts in collaboration with the new Sticky Notes app. Here's a preview of this new functionality, and how it currently works in the latest Insider Preview Build of the Anniversary Update, before the new bits roll out to our PCs on August 2. Windows has had a built-in Sticky Notes program ever since Windows XP arrived nearly 15 years ago.