About a year ago, when I was hanging out at a bar after work, talking about dating--the swipes, the winks, awkward IRL meetups, and, in my case, a message from a swinger who wanted me to help him with a woodworking project in his garage while his kids were at school--a friend brought up a new site called the League. "There's a wait list," she said. "I want to get on it." The League, for the uninitiated, is the ivy-covered country club of dating apps, designed for people who are "too popular as it is." There's a rigorous screening process--"We do all that dirty work for you"--that takes into account where your diplomas come from, the prestige of your titles, and, crucially, your influence on social media.

There hasn't been a truly significant update to the Xbox One since November, with the Xbox One Experience which aimed to make the console faster and more social. But now Microsoft is gearing up for another update this summer that will see the console become more unified with the PC platform. The update is to be rolled out to the Xbox Preview audience for beta test over the coming weeks, with regular Xbox users not expected to get access to the new bag of tricks until summer. But that's not stopped Microsoft releasing details on what the update will include. The most notable addition is that the new update will include support for Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana on headsets and Kinect.

I'm an Android girl who loves her iPad mini and her Amazon Echo. I also plan to be the first to bow before Skynet, once Judgment Day truly arrives. But I want to make sure I'm backing the right robot voice. I said "Hey Siri" and "Alexa" more than 300 times to determine which of these two virtual assistants, bordering on AI, truly represent Cyberdyne Systems in its infancy, or whether I should just wait for Google Home. Using an iPhone 6s with Hey Siri enabled and an Alexa-powered Amazon Echo, I asked questions to determine each assistant's intelligence, speed, versatility and personality while both were connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Your phone is already smart, so what's next? Artificial intelligence and machine learning is coming to the smartphone in ways much bigger than Siri. Earlier this year, Google announced they'll be working with semiconductor company Movidius By licensing some very special Visual Processing Unit chips, Google plans to move away from data centers and into users' real lives--and phones. Current smartphones already use a certain amount of AI. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Viv, and other artificial assistants are data-based machine-learning wonders.

Alexa, Siri, Cortana and OK Google are all digital celebrities. But a new study has found that they are only popular behind closed doors. Research shows that 51 percent of consumers use voice assistants in the car, but only 6 percent will activate them in public. Alexa, Siri, Cortana and OK Google are all digital celebrities. But a new study has found that they are only popular behind closed doors.

While the complexity of the searching and result-ranking technology behind Apple's Siri would likely elude most of its users, the value of a context-sensitive personal assistant certainly has not. Yet while Siri spawned a new generation of anthropomorphic digital assistants, researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are taking the concept much further to help enterprises catch up to the growth of data. Industrial products distributor Coventry Group is among the latest companies to jump onto the trend. The company, whose fasteners, fluid systems, gasket and hardware divisions collectively employ around 650 people, is working with Adelaide-based data-analytics specialist Complexica to apply that company's AI technology – personified as Larry, the Digital Analyst – to guide decisions around sales and pricing strategies. Introducing Larry – a collection of algorithms delivered on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis via Amazon's cloud – to Coventry's business is a two to four month process that will see the technology finetuned to the company's operating parameters.

We consider the problem of recommending relevant labels (items) for a given data point (user). In particular, we are interested in the practically important setting where the evaluation is with respect to non-decomposable (over labels) performance metrics like the $F_1$ measure, and the training data has missing labels. To this end, we propose a generic framework that given a performance metric $\Psi$, can devise a regularized objective function and a threshold such that all the values in the predicted score vector above and only above the threshold are selected to be positive. We show that the regret or generalization error in the given metric $\Psi$ is bounded ultimately by estimation error of certain underlying parameters. In particular, we derive regret bounds under three popular settings: a) collaborative filtering, b) multilabel classification, and c) PU (positive-unlabeled) learning. For each of the above problems, we can obtain precise non-asymptotic regret bound which is small even when a large fraction of labels is missing. Our empirical results on synthetic and benchmark datasets demonstrate that by explicitly modeling for missing labels and optimizing the desired performance metric, our algorithm indeed achieves significantly better performance (like $F_1$ score) when compared to methods that do not model missing label information carefully.

Quick thinking and Apple's digital assistant have saved the life of a little girl in Australia. Stacey Gleeson called on Siri after realizing her one-year-old daughter had turned blue and stopped breathing. 'Hey Siri, call me the ambulance', Gleeson yelled at her white iPhone that laid on the carpet across the room, which prompted the digital hero to dial for help. Stacey Gleeson (pictured) called on the power of Siri after realizing her one-year-old daughter had turned blue and stopped breathing. 'Hey Siri, call me the ambulance', Gleeson yelled, which prompted the digital hero to dial for help -- allowing her to focus on reviving her daughter Stacey Gleeson caught a glimpse of Giana on the baby monitor and saw she had turned blue and stopped breathing.

"Alexa, ask Pebble how the Kickstarter campaign is doing." Today, we're very excited to announce that integrated Amazon Alexa support is coming Pebble Core! Core will be the first truly independent 3G wearable to give you the magic of Alexa on the go. Ask for your latest workout summary, catch up on current news, check the weather, or change your tunes--Alexa has you covered with its ever improving set of skills. Pebble Core streams music from Spotify, tracks your workouts with GPS, and now gives you the power of Alexa--all from the palm of your hand. Back the first truly connected ultra-wearable on Kickstarter, starting at 69.

A major battle is brewing between four behemoths of the technology industry. You may not be aware of the fight, but the winner will have a major impact on your future. Apple kicked off this battle off when it introduced its voice assistant, Siri. IPhone users can use Siri to get information through a voice- and hands-free process. The underlining technology behind Siri is based on artificial intelligence algorithms, Natural Language Interfaces (NLI) and a form of machine learning.