At Computex today, Asus revealed the Zenbo home robot. Kind of like Echo meets Keecker with a bit of Pepper sprinkled in the mix, it's been created to offer busy modern family members a helping hand with everyday tasks like keeping the kids entertained, controlling connected smart devices and providing recipe inspiration for mealtimes. The company also sees it acting as a remote guardian for the elderly. The Zenbo is being pitched as an entertainment center, personal assistant and home automation controller. It's able to move around the home on its own thanks to large wheels on its sides powered by electric drive, or listen out for voice commands from its owner.

Classical collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering methods try to learn a static recommendation model given training data. These approaches are far from ideal in highly dynamic recommendation domains such as news recommendation and computational advertisement, where the set of items and users is very fluid. In this work, we investigate an adaptive clustering technique for content recommendation based on exploration-exploitation strategies in contextual multi-armed bandit settings. Our algorithm takes into account the collaborative effects that arise due to the interaction of the users with the items, by dynamically grouping users based on the items under consideration and, at the same time, grouping items based on the similarity of the clusterings induced over the users. The resulting algorithm thus takes advantage of preference patterns in the data in a way akin to collaborative filtering methods. We provide an empirical analysis on medium-size real-world datasets, showing scalability and increased prediction performance (as measured by click-through rate) over state-of-the-art methods for clustering bandits. We also provide a regret analysis within a standard linear stochastic noise setting.

I have spent time lately exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Assistants (VA) & Chatbots and how these can be used within a bank – after all I invest in fintech so this revelation should not shock anyone. The purpose of this post is not share my findings on these discoveries, what works, what does not, what a bank should do, what hot trends I believe in and which startups I am interested in backing. Rather, my purpose is to share my personal views on how I would like "technology" to augment me. Note that I refrain from writing "how I would like AI to augment me" as I am unsure if AI is the right term for what I am seeking. I do not differ from the majority of my fellow human beings in as much as I want to be better.

With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history. Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

Many people criticize Apple's voice-based assistant since Siri tends to run into problems on the iPhone and other devices. Some even worry that Apple might have a tough time combating Google's artificial intelligence, and even potentially face a fate similar to BlackBerry in the event that its AI can't compete. But it turns out that Apple is working on an advanced AI product of its own, which could be unveiled in the very near future. DON'T MISS: iPhone 6s and Galaxy S7 faced off in a drop test and it was brutal After a recent report said that Siri APIs will be open to third-party developers and a Siri-based competitor for Amazon Echo will be unveiled at WWDC 2016, a new story delves into Apple's highly secretive AI research and development plans. Writing on Medium, Brian Roemmele reminds us that Apple is very interested in voice-based computing – a Steve Jobs legacy – and in AI.

The assistant wars are in full swing, with Google Assistant and Viv entering the fray and existing players such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Hound and Google's Now all stepping up fight for consumers' hearts and minds. Apple's rumored Amazon Echo competitor, which VentureBeat believes is a next-gen Apple TV, could blow all the assistants out of the water when it comes to deciphering complex natural language queries. And powering it--VocalIQ, a sophisticate technology Apple acquired back in October 2015. Tech Insider provided an in-depth overview of how VocalIQ could make Siri a lot smarter than it is today. Tech Insider's piece, titled "Apple is working on an AI system that wipes the floor with Google and everyone else," notes that Apple had been testing VocalIQ technology against Siri, Google Now and Cortana. "Users asked each AI questions using normal language, not the robotic commands you're used to using with digital assistants," reads the article.

'Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that's kid-friendly.' We're not sending you on an arbitrary mission like Challenge Anneka – the new Siri is due for an upgrade and it's promised to be scarily precise. Apple has snapped up a small team in Cambridge who are developing VocalIQ – a more robust and capable version of Siri, reports Business Insider UK. The new system is expected to be much more robust and capable than the Siri we know and love. And it's been put through its paces in a series of tests against the likes of Google Now, Cortana and Siri (of course).

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Paradoxically, even as they open new windows on nature and human behaviour, learning algorithms themselves have remained shrouded in mystery. Hardly a day goes by without a story in the media involving machine learning, whether it's a tech company launching a virtual personal assistant; Google's AlphaGo beating the human Go champion; US retailer Target finding out a teenager is pregnant before her parents do; or the US National Security Agency (NSA) looking for dots to connect. But in each case the learning algorithm driving the story is a black box. Even books on big data skirt around what really happens when the computer swallows all those terabytes and magically comes up with new insights. At best, we're left with the impression that learning algorithms just find correlations between pairs of events, such as Googling "flu medicine" and having the flu.

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?