SAN FRANCISCO – Apple is working to make its iPhone and other gadgets smarter, responding to competitors' recent moves by building more artificial intelligence into its Siri digital assistant, photos, maps and other online services. The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers using the fingerprint authorization on their iPhone or Apple Watch. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products.

After watching Apple's keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've seen some of these features before. Here are some of the features in iOS 10 and Mac that take inspiration from Google -- and others. With Apple's release of iOS 10, the Photos app will use machine learning and facial recognition to automatically group together photos of common faces or subjects without you needing to tag anything. The Memories feature organizes photos into categories like trips, events and can even make videos with music that matches the mood. Yet these were features that have already become commonplace with Google Photos when it launched in 2015.

The gunman who attacked a Florida LGBT nightclub had attended the club before the attack and had used a gay dating and chat app, witnesses said. Kevin West, a regular at Pulse nightclub, said Omar Mateen messaged him on and off for a year before the shooting using the gay chat and dating app Jack'd. West was dropping off a friend at the club when he noticed Mateen – whom he knew by sight but not by name – crossing the street wearing a dark cap and carrying a black cellphone about 1 a.m., an hour before the shooting. "He walked directly past me. I said, 'Hey,' and he turned and said, 'Hey,'" and nodded his head, West said.

Kevin West, a regular at Pulse, said Omar Mateen messaged him sporadically over the last year using the app Jack'd. West was dropping off a friend at the club when he noticed Mateen crossing the street wearing a dark cap and carrying a cellphone at about 1 a.m., an hour before the shooting. "He walked directly past me. I said, 'Hey,' and he turned and said, 'Hey,'" and nodded his head, West said. At least four regular customers of Pulse told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday that they believe they had seen Mateen there before.

The purpose if this master's thesis is to study and develop a new algorithmic framework for Collaboartive Filtering to produce recommendations in the top-N recommendation problem. Thus, we propose Lanczos Latent Factor Recommender (LLFR); a novel "big data friendly" collaborative filtering algorithm for top-N recommendation. Using a computationally efficient Lanczos-based procedure, LLFR builds a low dimensional item similarity model, that can be readily exploited to produce personalized ranking vectors over the item space. A number of experiments on real datasets (MovieLens10M, Yahoo!Music) at different density levels indicate that LLFR outperforms other state-of-the-art top-N recommendation methods from a computational as well as a qualitative perspective. Our experimental results also show that its relative performance gains, compared to competing methods, increase as the data get sparser, where there is not enough data for the system to uncover similarities and generate reliable recommendations. More specifically, this is true both when the sparsity is generalized - as in the New Community Problem, a very common problem faced by real recommender systems in their beginning stages, when there is not sufficient number of ratings for the collaborative filtering algorithms to uncover similarities between items or users - and in the very interesting case where the sparsity is localized in a small fraction of the dataset - as in the New Users Problem, where new users are introduced to the system, they have not rated many items and thus, the CF algorithm can not make reliable personalized recommendations yet.

"I think you will see us open up more in the future," Apple CEO Tim Cook said the AllThingsD D11 conference in 2013. Now, roughly three years later, we have the clearest picture yet of what a more open Apple looks like. During its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 13, Apple announced a slew of changes to some of its apps and services that allow them to work with third parties. Siri, iMessage, Apple Maps, and the Phone app are among the Apple services that developers will be able to tap into. This means iPhone owners will be able to do things like call an Uber through Siri, order food without leaving the Messages app, and make reservations in Apple Maps.

Virtual personal assistants can do just about everything: They can help a person order things online, turn the lights on and off, or play music from a favorite playlist. A new personal assistant is joining the abundance of time-management tools out there, using artificial intelligence to help developers tackle the problems of managing their time and scheduling everything so their day can be fulfilling. The virtual assistant's name is Trevor AI, and it's an app that is available today in the App Store. Development for Android will begin as soon as the app secures funding, which should happen in the next two months. The project for Trevor AI started when founder George Petrov, a business and computer software expert, brought his raw idea to the Founder Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria in December 2015.

One of the "big" announcements at WWDC: OS X will be renamed macOS. The late co-founder was famously obsessed with simplicity. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday was anything but, offering a dizzying list of features. "The mother of all releases," Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted about the "gigantic" nature of iOS 10, the latest version of its software that powers iPhones and iPads. But there's something to be said about the less is more approach, with few standout announcements emerging from the two-hour presentation.

This includes the future of messaging, photos, maps, and more. Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is the site of Apple's WWDC confeence (Photo: Edward C. Baig) SAN FRANCISCO -- To many of the folks keeping score, Apple was already behind rivals heading into its annual Worldwide Developers Conference here in San Francisco. In the hotbed fields of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and voice response, Apple has lagged Amazon, Google and Facebook -- even though Apple's Siri was the first to familiarize most people with the idea of a vocal personal assistant. I'm sorry to say that Apple didn't say a peep about VR or AR (augmented reality) during what was a packed two-hour presentation. Or spend much time focused on artificial intelligence.

The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products. Still, the tech giant is taking a cautious approach to integrating computer intelligence into its online services.