Coming off its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years, Apple Inc. kicks off its annual developers' conference Monday in San Francisco facing questions about whether the company's best days are behind it. The focus of the weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference is expected to be on Siri, Apple's digital assistant. When Apple introduced Siri as an iPhone feature in 2011, it heralded a future of people finding information or completing tasks on their devices by speaking rather than typing or tapping. That vision of Siri hasn't fully materialized, leaving the door open for other technology companies to push into Apple's turf. Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have all introduced voice-activated digital assistants that rely on artificial intelligence?technology that allows computers to understand inferences and context so they can make decisions like a human brain instead of following programmed instructions.

Light globes that change colour with the tap of an app, coffee machines you can talk to, and ovens that know exactly how long to cook your food: our homes are getting smart. These devices, just a few examples of what is known as "the internet of things" (or IOT), have been called the "next great disruptor" and "the second digital revolution". One of the great hopes of this revolution is that it will help households save energy. Sensors can turn off lights and appliances when not in use, or turn the heating down when people go to bed. Smartphone apps can provide households with more insight into the energy use of their appliances.

Intelligent Personal Assistant, Automated Personal Assistant or Automated Virtual Personal Assistant can perform tasks, or services, on behalf of an individual based on a combination of user input, and location awareness. It has the ability to access information from a variety of online sources such as weather conditions, traffic congestion, news, stock prices, user schedules, and retail prices. Intelligent Personal Assistant has the ability to organize and maintain information and includes the management of emails, calendar events, files, and to do lists. Some automated personal assistants can perform concierge type tasks or provide information based on voice input or commands and some smart personal agents, which can automatically perform management or data handling tasks based on online information without user initiation or interaction. Intelligent Agents can be classified based on their degree of perceived intelligence and capability such as simple reflex agents, model-based reflex agents, goal-based agents, utility-based agents and learning agents.

Soon our wearables will be hearables. It is a inevitable reality that should not come as a surprise, because like a phoenix rising from the ashes, hearables are slowly but surely finding their way into the wearable tech market. Hearable technology's growth will ignite a new era of convenience along with a new era of fashion within the context of the technology we wear. Last July the funding of Doppler Labs' 17 million Series B signaled to many that hearables could be a surge. Then again if one was to put it into context, a single investment in a particular company should not automatically mean that the whole hearable tech industry is suddenly accelerating.

It would be cool if there was a follow-up on how to do PCA approximate nearest neighbor search to do prediction online instead of just doing prediction in batch directly using SVD.

Coming off its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years, Apple Inc. kicks off its annual developers' conference Monday in San Francisco facing questions about whether the company's best days are behind it. The focus of the weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference is expected to be on Siri, Apple's digital assistant. When Apple introduced Siri as an iPhone feature in 2011, it heralded a future of people finding information or completing tasks on their devices by speaking rather than typing or tapping. That vision of Siri hasn't fully materialized, leaving the door open for other technology companies to push into Apple's turf. Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have all introduced voice-activated digital assistants that rely on artificial intelligence -- technology that allows computers to understand inferences and context so they can make decisions like a human brain instead of following programmed instructions.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has used virtual assistants in households ever since it rolled out with its Echo speaker, in 2014. Echo has been a great hit among customers. Many parents think that Amazon's digital assistant should incorporate a "family mode" to better help their kids learn manners and social ethics. Thanks to the device's ability to comprehend verbal commands, the advent of "Alexa", Amazon's digital assistant, has encouraged the trend of "smart homes." Users can simply activate their Alexa-powered devices by calling out "Alexa"--a fairly easy trick to switch on the Bluetooth speaker.

FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2011, file photo, Apple's Phil Schiller talks about Siri during an announcement at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Apple's Siri made a big splash when the wisecracking digital assistant debuted in 2011. But as its competitors jockey to build intelligent "chat bots" and voice-controlled home systems capable of more challenging artificial-intelligence feats, Siri at times no longer seems cutting edge. On Monday, June 13, 2016, Apple is expected to demonstrate how much smarter Siri can get as it kicks off its annual software conference. It's a potentially momentous time for the company; sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, and AI is emerging as a key tech battleground.

This tutorial will describe how a surprisingly small amount of code can be used to build a recommendation engine using the MapR Sandbox for Hadoop with Apache Mahout and Elasticsearch. This tutorial will run on the MapR Sandbox. The tutorial also requires Elasticsearch and Mahout to be installed on the sandbox. Step 1: Indexing the movie meta data in Elasticsearch In Elasticsearch, documents contain fields which are, by default, all indexed. Typically documents are written as a single-level JSON structure.