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 Personal Assistant Systems


Governance of the AI, by the AI, and for the AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the past half century, there have been several false dawns during which the "arrival" of world-changing artificial intelligence (AI) has been heralded. Tempting fate, the authors believe the age of AI has, indeed, finally arrived. Powerful image generators, such as DALL-E2 and Midjourney have suddenly allowed anyone with access the ability easily to create rich and complex art. In a similar vein, text generators, such as GPT3.5 (including ChatGPT) and BLOOM, allow users to compose detailed written descriptions of many topics of interest. And, it is even possible now for a person without extensive expertise in writing software to use AI to generate code capable of myriad applications. While AI will continue to evolve and improve, probably at a rapid rate, the current state of AI is already ushering in profound changes to many different sectors of society. Every new technology challenges the ability of humanity to govern it wisely. However, governance is usually viewed as both possible and necessary due to the disruption new technology often poses to social structures, industries, the environment, and other important human concerns. In this article, we offer an analysis of a range of interactions between AI and governance, with the hope that wise decisions may be made that maximize benefits and minimize costs. The article addresses two main aspects of this relationship: the governance of AI by humanity, and the governance of humanity by AI. The approach we have taken is itself informed by AI, as this article was written collaboratively by the authors and ChatGPT.


Maximizing Submodular Functions for Recommendation in the Presence of Biases

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Subset selection tasks, arise in recommendation systems and search engines and ask to select a subset of items that maximize the value for the user. The values of subsets often display diminishing returns, and hence, submodular functions have been used to model them. If the inputs defining the submodular function are known, then existing algorithms can be used. In many applications, however, inputs have been observed to have social biases that reduce the utility of the output subset. Hence, interventions to improve the utility are desired. Prior works focus on maximizing linear functions -- a special case of submodular functions -- and show that fairness constraint-based interventions can not only ensure proportional representation but also achieve near-optimal utility in the presence of biases. We study the maximization of a family of submodular functions that capture functions arising in the aforementioned applications. Our first result is that, unlike linear functions, constraint-based interventions cannot guarantee any constant fraction of the optimal utility for this family of submodular functions. Our second result is an algorithm for submodular maximization. The algorithm provably outputs subsets that have near-optimal utility for this family under mild assumptions and that proportionally represent items from each group. In empirical evaluation, with both synthetic and real-world data, we observe that this algorithm improves the utility of the output subset for this family of submodular functions over baselines.


I'm a cybersecurity expert - here are the apps I would NEVER use

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Many of the world's most popular apps have dubious terms of service, and exploit private data to make money, according to a cybersecurity expert. He says that by allowing data to be monitored by'big tech' companies, they can decide what we see online, and we become'defined by what computer algorithms decide for us.' Digital voice assistants such as Alexa are serious privacy risks, Gaffney says. The devices listen for'wake words' before operating but are listening to them all the time - and take snippets of your voice and process them in data centers far from your home. Gaffney says, 'I don't use them at all, but for those that do, I would not place them in the bathroom or bedroom. Though they wake on trigger words, they listen for a few seconds afterward.


I'm a cybersecurity expert - here's the 3 apps I would NEVER use

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Many of the world's most popular apps have dubious terms of service, and exploit private data to make money, according to a cybersecurity expert. He says that by allowing data to be monitored by'big tech' companies, they can decide what we see online, and we become'defined by what computer algorithms decide for us.' Below are Gaffney's three apps he would never use due to fears over privacy. Digital voice assistants such as Alexa are serious privacy risks, Gaffney says. The devices listen for'wake words' before operating but are listening to them all the time - and take snippets of your voice and process them in data centers far from your home. Gaffney says, 'I don't use them at all, but for those that do, I would not place them in the bathroom or bedroom.


When Newer is Not Better: Does Deep Learning Really Benefit Recommendation From Implicit Feedback?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, neural models have been repeatedly touted to exhibit state-of-the-art performance in recommendation. Nevertheless, multiple recent studies have revealed that the reported state-of-the-art results of many neural recommendation models cannot be reliably replicated. A primary reason is that existing evaluations are performed under various inconsistent protocols. Correspondingly, these replicability issues make it difficult to understand how much benefit we can actually gain from these neural models. It then becomes clear that a fair and comprehensive performance comparison between traditional and neural models is needed. Motivated by these issues, we perform a large-scale, systematic study to compare recent neural recommendation models against traditional ones in top-n recommendation from implicit data. We propose a set of evaluation strategies for measuring memorization performance, generalization performance, and subgroup-specific performance of recommendation models. We conduct extensive experiments with 13 popular recommendation models (including two neural models and 11 traditional ones as baselines) on nine commonly used datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that even with extensive hyper-parameter searches, neural models do not dominate traditional models in all aspects, e.g., they fare worse in terms of average HitRate. We further find that there are areas where neural models seem to outperform non-neural models, for example, in recommendation diversity and robustness between different subgroups of users and items. Our work illuminates the relative advantages and disadvantages of neural models in recommendation and is therefore an important step towards building better recommender systems.


KAIROS: Building Cost-Efficient Machine Learning Inference Systems with Heterogeneous Cloud Resources

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online inference is becoming a key service product for many businesses, deployed in cloud platforms to meet customer demands. Despite their revenue-generation capability, these services need to operate under tight Quality-of-Service (QoS) and cost budget constraints. This paper introduces KAIROS, a novel runtime framework that maximizes the query throughput while meeting QoS target and a cost budget. KAIROS designs and implements novel techniques to build a pool of heterogeneous compute hardware without online exploration overhead, and distribute inference queries optimally at runtime. Our evaluation using industry-grade deep learning (DL) models shows that KAIROS yields up to 2X the throughput of an optimal homogeneous solution, and outperforms state-of-the-art schemes by up to 70%, despite advantageous implementations of the competing schemes to ignore their exploration overhead.


How Bad is Top-$K$ Recommendation under Competing Content Creators?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Content creators compete for exposure on recommendation platforms, and such strategic behavior leads to a dynamic shift over the content distribution. However, how the creators' competition impacts user welfare and how the relevance-driven recommendation influences the dynamics in the long run are still largely unknown. This work provides theoretical insights into these research questions. We model the creators' competition under the assumptions that: 1) the platform employs an innocuous top-$K$ recommendation policy; 2) user decisions follow the Random Utility model; 3) content creators compete for user engagement and, without knowing their utility function in hindsight, apply arbitrary no-regret learning algorithms to update their strategies. We study the user welfare guarantee through the lens of Price of Anarchy and show that the fraction of user welfare loss due to creator competition is always upper bounded by a small constant depending on $K$ and randomness in user decisions; we also prove the tightness of this bound. Our result discloses an intrinsic merit of the myopic approach to the recommendation, i.e., relevance-driven matching performs reasonably well in the long run, as long as users' decisions involve randomness and the platform provides reasonably many alternatives to its users.


Ripple Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks For Recommendation Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Using knowledge graphs to assist deep learning models in making recommendation decisions has recently been proven to effectively improve the model's interpretability and accuracy. This paper introduces an end-to-end deep learning model, named RKGCN, which dynamically analyses each user's preferences and makes a recommendation of suitable items. It combines knowledge graphs on both the item side and user side to enrich their representations to maximize the utilization of the abundant information in knowledge graphs. RKGCN is able to offer more personalized and relevant recommendations in three different scenarios. The experimental results show the superior effectiveness of our model over 5 baseline models on three real-world datasets including movies, books, and music.


Amazon's Echo Dot drops to $30

Engadget

If you've been patiently waiting for a sale on the 5th-generation Echo Dot, now is the time to buy one. A handful of models are on sale. To start, you can get the basic model for $30 or 40 percent off. Moreover, all three colorways – charcoal, deep sea blue and glacier white – are part of the sale. Alternatively, the Echo Dot with Clock is also on sale.


Predictability of Machine Learning Algorithms and Related Feature Extraction Techniques

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To implement machine learning, it is essential to first determine an appropriate algorithm for the dataset. Different algorithms may produce a large number of different models with different hyperparameter configurations, and it usually takes a lot of time to run the model on a large dataset when the model is relatively complex. Therefore, how to predict the performance of a model on a dataset is an fundamental problem to be solved. This thesis designs a prediction system based on matrix factorization to predict the classification accuracy of a specific model on a particular dataset. In this thesis, we conduct a comprehensive empirical research on more than fifty datasets that we collected from the openml web site.