Cortana is easily one of my favorite features in Windows 10. I use it every day for getting amusing, snarky answers to questions, setting calendar appointments and reminders, sending emails, or doing quick web searches. But those are just its most obvious uses. There are numerous lesser-known ways you can incorporate Microsoft's digital assistant into your life. Here are four useful tips.

Google Home is an always-on speaker coming later this year. LOS ANGELES - We know that Big Brother has been watching our every move for years--but are you ready to have your home conversations monitored as well? Following on the footsteps of Amazon's smash Echo connected speaker, which reads the weather and news, plays music, and turns lights on and off, based on your voice instructions, Google is set to launch its rival product, Google Home, later this year. And this week reports surfaced saying Apple could be joining the fray with its own speaker featuring the Siri personal digital assistant from the iPhone. Which begs the question--how do you feel about buying a connected speaker for the kitchen that could listen to every word you're saying?

Tech giant Google is set to infiltrate more than just your computer or smartphone after revealing its Google Home device will be launched later this year, permeating households with more Artificial Intelligence (AI). The device is a voice-activated smart assistant for your home. Imagine a virtual personal assistant shaped like a digital jug that sits next to you on the sofa, switching the TV channel over, or putting on some music without you having to get up or lift a finger or touch a remote. And if you have a question -- just ask -- and the device will retrieve the result for you from its search engine and speak back to you -- just like a virtual Q&A session. Rather excited about #GoogleHome… I'm a huge home automation geek and this is https://t.co/K4uChMKSGd "Google Home is the tech giant's answer to the question of how to bring you the smart home of tomorrow today -- or, at least, later this year," according to Tech website IT Pro.

Mountain View, California - Alphabet's Google unveiled its answer to Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant along with new messaging and virtual reality products at its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, doubling down on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the keys to its future. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant, along with the tabletop speaker appliance Google Home. He also unveiled Allo, a new messaging service that will compete with Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger products and feature a chatbot powered by the Google Assistant. Allo, like WhatsApp, will also have end-to-end encryption when it is rolled out this summer. Amazon's Echo, a surprise hit that has other tech giants racing to match it, uses a virtual assistant called Alexa, a cloud-based system that controls the Echo speaker and responds to voice-controlled commands by users.

The big razzmatazz show-and-tell press conference has become a staple of the tech world. Like latter day Great Lafayettes, today's tech CEOs produce out of their hat a series of eye-catching (or otherwise) new products to the appreciative applause of an enthusiastic audience. The instant reaction to last week's Google's I/O conference [innovation in the open] was a collective "meh". Allo, a new messaging app; Google Home, another me-too smart home device to rival Amazon's Echo; VR stuff and a few other bits and bobs. Twitter passed its judgement and moved on.

"Therefore render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." We tend to think that recommender systems are old hat. ECommerce platforms like Amazon have been using techniques like collaborative filtering for years to help shoppers navigate vast catalogues by inferring consumer taste from past behavior. And yet, we've all experienced the limitations of these approaches (that time you bought a toilet bowl plunger to subsequently be flooded by recommendations for strange bathroom accessories). This may be a nuisance for consumers, but it doesn't jeopardize eCommerce business models: only 35% of Amazon's sales, for example, are driven from recommendations.

Beta testers who elect to receive the the freshest test builds of Windows 10 have some new features on the way, as we move even closer to the big Anniversary Update this summer. With Build 14352, Cortana's music abilities go from simply being able to play any song from your library by voice command, to pulling any song from the Groove Music catalog (assuming you have a Groove music subscription, of course), and now also can easily set a timer, similar to other automated assistants like Amazon Alexa. Windows Ink is also getting a new Cortana wrinkle, since you can create reminders for it directly from notes, as well as write down a phone number, URL or email address and launch the appropriate app directly from a note.

With Microsoft's Insider Preview Build 14352 of Windows 10, released on Thursday afternoon, new features include the ability to ask Cortana for specific songs and ink reminders in Windows Ink's Sticky Notes. The most interesting addition is this: You can now run two antivirus programs on your PC. Gamers, too, receive a boost: full-screen Windows Game bar support for some perpetual hits like League of Legends and World of Warcraft. There's one catch: Just as Google requires a subscription to Google Play Music to process specific song requests, you must have a subscription to Microsoft's Groove Music to enable the new request-line feature in Cortana. Why this matters: Microsoft hasn't boosted Windows 10's capabilities dramatically with this new Insider build.

Motivated by an application of eliciting users' preferences, we investigate the problem of learning hemimetrics, i.e., pairwise distances among a set of $n$ items that satisfy triangle inequalities and non-negativity constraints. In our application, the (asymmetric) distances quantify private costs a user incurs when substituting one item by another. We aim to learn these distances (costs) by asking the users whether they are willing to switch from one item to another for a given incentive offer. Without exploiting structural constraints of the hemimetric polytope, learning the distances between each pair of items requires $\Theta(n^2)$ queries. We propose an active learning algorithm that substantially reduces this sample complexity by exploiting the structural constraints on the version space of hemimetrics. Our proposed algorithm achieves provably-optimal sample complexity for various instances of the task. For example, when the items are embedded into $K$ tight clusters, the sample complexity of our algorithm reduces to $O(n K)$. Extensive experiments on a restaurant recommendation data set support the conclusions of our theoretical analysis.

On May 10, the world-class admin behind John Chambers's success was honored with one of the top awards in her field: Debbie Gross received the Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence. Clearly, Debbie is a force. This CNBC story gives us a peek into her life keeping John at the top of his game. People are rightly saying she's a role model for next-generation administrators. But what people aren't saying is that some next-gen admins are made not of flesh and blood like Debbie but of compute cycles.