Lutron announced today that its Caséta wireless lighting systems are now compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice-control system, enabling owners of Amazon's Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, or Amazon Fire TV to control Caséta-connected lighting fixtures with voice commands. "Caséta users who also own Alexa-capable devices can now dim, brighten, and control individual lights or groups of lights using their voice," Lutron product manager Neil Orchowski said in an embargoed briefing last week. Lutron's Caséta Wireless Smart Bridge and Caséta Wireless Smart Bridge Pro can control up to 50 Caséta lighting-control devices, using Lutron's proprietary Clear Connect technology. The company's Caséta Wireless Smart Bridge Pro is also compatible with Apple's HomeKit platform, and the company has partnered with Nest (participating in the Works With Nest program), Comcast (it can be integrated into Xfinity Home systems), and several smart thermostat manufacturers (including Honeywell, Carrier, and Ecobee). The Caséta line also includes in-wall switches and dimmers.

In a decision announced Thursday, March 10, 2016, Yahoo set up a battle for control of its board by appointing two directors likely to further agitate an activist shareholder threatening to lead an investor mutiny aimed at ousting Mayer unless she bows to demands to sell the companyís Internet operations. NEW YORK–The financial meltdown at Yahoo has gotten "increasingly dire." That's what veteran Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher reported in Re/code after examining disclosure documents inside the sale "book" Yahoo's bankers have shown to prospective bidders. Swisher writes that the "collective issues depicted in the book has many nervous about bidding." Among the reveals: Yahoo is in a "serious free fall."

While Siri now lives on the phones of hundreds of millions of Apple users, and a few people are responsible for helping get the now ubiquitous assistant off the ground. One of those people is Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Sir and now co-founder and CEO of Viv, a new platform-based AI product. Dag is the CEO and co-founder of Viv, which he started with Siri vets Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham. Previously, he was the Co-founder and CEO of Siri after spinning the technology out of Stanford Research Institute in 2007. After Apple acquired Siri in 2010 Dag became the Director of iPhone Apps at Apple running the Siri and speech recognition teams.

Forget hammers and screwdrivers -- iPhones are the most important tool of our times. But do you wield yours like a pro, or do your thumbs fumble its screen like an amateur? From apps that dash off reminders with a simple tap, to settings that make your battery stretch well into the night, these nine tips can help you get the most out of your iPhone. When you find a gem online, you want to stow it away fast, before you forget it. Mail to Self is a one-tap solution for sending yourself an email with a link to whatever webpage you're browsing.

"Machine learning" is a term that's heard more often in startup and big data circles than "artificial intelligence", and interestingly enough, Google Trends confirms what's already heard through the technological grapevine: While most business laypeople have heard the term, they're more interested in what machine learning (ML) can do, as opposed to how it works. While it could be argued that both are important – even for business people – this article will focus on five current applications of ML that are likely to be important parts of an expanding trend. Most of us are familiar with Amazon's now-famous, ubiquitous "you might also like…" These suggested products aren't merely based off of randomizing products in a similar category and putting them up as a "best shot," those suggestions are the result of millions and millions of online transactions through Amazon's eCommerce platform – crunched and analyzed to discern what a user like you (geography, account history, engagement on the page, cart value) might like. Given the 200-and-something million products that Amazon offers, that's far too much information for a human being to calibrate individually over the course of 200 years, never mind in real time. Companies like Pandora and Spotify are also famously employing recommendation engines, undoubtedly contributing to their success in the domain of streaming music.

As another example, to achieve high accuracy in recommender systems [45], [60], we need to fully understand the content of items (e.g., documents and movies), analyze the profile and preference of users, and evaluate the similarity among users. Deep learning is good at the first subtask while PGM excels at the other two. Besides the fact that better understanding of item content would help with the analysis of user profiles, the estimated similarity among users could provide valuable information for understanding item content in return. In order to fully utilize this bidirectional effect to boost recommendation accuracy, we might wish to unify deep learning and PGM in one single principled probabilistic framework, as done in [60]. Besides recommender systems, the need for Bayesian deep learning may also arise when we are dealing with control of nonlinear dynamical systems with raw images as input. Consider controlling a complex dynamical system according to the live video stream received from a camera. This problem can be transformed into iteratively performing two tasks, perception from raw images and control based on dynamic models. The perception task can be taken care of using multiple layers of simple nonlinear transformation (deep learning) while the control task usually needs more sophisticated models like hidden Markov models and Kalman filters [21], [38]. The feedback loop is then completed by the fact that actions chosen by the control model can affect the received video stream in return.

Been aching to try some of the bigger improvements from Windows 10's Anniversary Update? It's time to give them a shot. Microsoft has released a Windows 10 Insider Preview (only on the Fast ring) that includes a few of the choicer improvements. The highlight is likely to be the Cortana-based cross-device features: if you have an Android or Windows phone, Cortana will tell you when your handset's battery is running low, help you find a lost phone and share navigation directions across devices.

Rob High, IBM Fellow, VP and chief technology officer for Watson, showed how IBM's Watson cognitive computing technology can tease out the sadness and anger in a particularly hackneyed dating profile - or teach a robot to playfully dance in response to a teasing question - during a keynote Wednesday at our GPU Technology Conference.

The Echo Dot is the Amazon Echo in a smaller form factor. In 2014, Amazon released a tower speaker named Echo. Housed inside of it was Alexa, the company's virtual assistant meant to take on Siri inside the iPhone and Google Now for Android. Weirdly, the Echo wasn't attached to a phone like the former two but it could still answer queries, tell jokes, and--of course--complete Amazon purchases. But that was pretty much it.

Google Calendar integration with Echo and Alexa has been around a long time, but many (myself included) haven't made much use of it because of its limited functionality: you could check what you'd already added to your calendar via the Google Calendar app or website, but you couldn't add new events or reminders to the calendar using Alexa voice commands. Last week, LME Facebook page follower Oliver Crown alerted me that now you can! Oliver reported using the command, "Alexa, add [event name] to my calendar on [day] at [time]," but that command didn't work for me. The command I've found that always works is, "Alexa, add an event to my calendar." After that, Alexa will prompt you, "For when?", meaning what day. You can either give the day as [month] [day], or day of the week (for the upcoming 7-day period only).