This panel gives attendees an opportunity to see and hear how Intelligent Assistants evolve into resources – ranging from personal avatars to robots – that use natural language understanding and machine learning to improve aspects of our daily lives. Speakers: Shawn Edmunds, VP, North America, ValidSoft Alex Lebrun, Co-Founder, Wit.ai, Facebook Wally Brill, Principal Consultant, 21contact Doc Searls, Author, "The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge" From Intelligent Assistants Conference 2015 (Oct.

Favourite ... Jon Snow was killed in the season finale of Game of Thrones. SIRI is great at finding directions -- maybe even to Westeros. It turns out your Apple gadget's artificial intelligence is a Game of Thrones super fan and will happily answer all your questions about the gory fantasy series. Your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch will even come up with different responses if you ask the same question twice. If you ask, "Is Jon Snow dead?" in a reference to the show's season cliffhanger, Siri might reply: "Well, you know what they say to Death ... But why would tomorrow be any better? Puppy love ... Jon Snow finds Ghost as a pup in Game of Thrones. Or, as Scandal actress Kerry Washington showed on Twitter, Siri might respond with a reference to Snow's canine companion. I just hope someone is setting up doggie daycare for Ghost."

Chances are you're part of a company built on the recent wave of mobile and cloud advances. Your business depends on your customer's ability and willingness to absorb the experience you've created across desktop, mobile, and the cloud and to respond accordingly with clicks, swipes, and touches. But that mode of customer interaction is about to diminish, and in some cases disappear, giving way to'invisible interfaces' like voice and gesture. How will you prepare your business for this shift? If you ask Siri for directions while you're driving hands-free, or ask Alexa to play an audiobook while you're mixing the dinner salad, you're familiar with an invisible interface.

Recently I wrote about interface visibility -- the presence and degree of friction in interface design and human computer interaction -- and the idea that it exists distinctly from specific interface paradigms. Since then I've been itching to revisit and dig a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of conversational interaction design, specifically the way context plays a key role in the construction of meaning in user experiences that leverage natural language (especially those of the invisible variety). The space is still super early, but in my (admittedly brief) time designing bot interactions, I've noticed a few key patterns that have shaped my own mental model for constructing seamless conversational interactions. In conversational interfaces, who initiates each new conversational interaction -- and their intent -- is key to establishing the tone and expectations of everything that follows. When the bot initiates, it's significantly easier to establish the direction and flow of conversation, thereby increasing the likelihood of producing a better, and more focused experience.

On Tuesday's episode of "The Daily Show," correspondents Jessica Williams and Ronny Chieng took a humorous yet hard-hitting look at a form of bigotry not often discussed: sexual racism. "Racism affects nearly every aspect of life, even -- and it truly pains me to say this -- f**king," host Trevor Noah said as he introduced the segment. Williams and Chieng specifically looked at how some groups, like black women and Asian men, faced undue discrimination in the world of online dating. "There is kind of a systemic racial bias pretty much in every dating site I've ever looked at," Christian Rudder, co-founder of OKCupid and author of the dating statistics book "Dataclysm," told the duo. "We found that 82 percent of non-black men have some bias against black women… And Asian men get the fewest messages and the worst ratings of any group of guys."

If you think chatbots are hot right now -- being used in psychotherapy, turning into racist trolls, and presenting an existential threat to Apple -- just wait until they turn into full-fledged personal assistants. In five years time, digital personal assistants will even more important than your smartphone, says University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos, author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World." "What you have right now on your smartphone is dozens of apps," Domingos tells Tech Insider, "with each app doing it's own thing." On any given Friday night, you use one app to find a restaurant, another to buy a movie ticket, another to figure out how to get to where you're going, and another to find a date to take out with you. "It's incredibly annoying," he says, since the apps "don't talk to each other and you have to learn all these different interfaces."

Microsoft may be de-emphasizing its Windows smartphone hardware, but it hasn't stopped rolling out new updates on its Insider program. Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 14322 was released to the Fast ring on Thursday, and includes several tweaks as well as more substantial upgrades. The most functional improvement concerns two new additions to the reminders function within Cortana. You can already tell Cortana to remind you to go to the store to buy a bottle of wine--but with the upgraded reminder, you can add a picture of said wine to help you identify it on the shelf. Microsoft has also made Cortana a target of shared content.

If you think chatbots are hot right now -- with how they're being used in psychotherapy, turning into racist trolls, and presenting an existential threat to Apple -- just wait until they turn into full-fledged personal assistants. In five years time, digital personal assistants will even more important than your smartphone, says University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos, author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World." "What you have right now on your smartphone is dozens of apps," Domingos tells Tech Insider, "with each app doing it's own thing." On any given Friday night, you use one app to find a restaurant, another to buy a movie ticket, another to figure out how to get to where you're going, and another to find a date to take out with you. "It's incredibly annoying," he says, since the apps "don't talk to each other and you have to learn all these different interfaces."

The Journalism Department at Emerson College and the Emerson Engagement Lab recently invited William Li to give a talk to introduce machine learning to journalism and communications students. This is a live blog account of the talk by Catherine D'Ignazio. William Li is a 2015–2016 Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 PhD computer science graduate from MIT. He develops and applies machine learning methods to answer social science questions computationally and to promote public understanding of law, politics, and public policy. His projects include predicting the authors of unsigned Supreme Court opinions, visualizing the complexity of our laws, and discovering ideas from large collections of public comments on proposed regulations. William has also worked on recommender systems, speech recognition, and user activity prediction at Apple and Mitsubishi Electric. He did his master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, founded the MIT Assistive Technology Club, and has taught classes that involve civic collaborations with organizations such as the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Cambridge Commission for People with Disabilities. William Li introduces the topic and that he wants to make the session very interactive.

Synxi, a ManyWorlds brand, discovers content and expertise across your organization most relevant to you. Delivered as apps for collaborative platforms including Microsoft SharePoint, Yammer and Tibbr, Synxi uses patented machine learning and behavioral inferencing technologies to anticipate and adapt to your context and needs.