Microsoft Cortana, we barely knew ye. A combination of inflationary effects of money printing through the pandemic, Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine, and even China's COVID-Zero lockdown policies -- are all contributing to a perfect economic storm hitting practically everyone. From gas prices to food costs, we're all tightening our belts, and for the world's biggest companies, that means accepting some harsh realities about some of their more experimental departments. Some of the biggest tech stories of this year revolved around Facebook's staggering fall from grace, with billions upon billions wiped off its market value owing to a smorgasbord of strategic and macroeconomic headwinds. The focus on its experimental metaverse saw the company rebrand to Meta and imagine a future where users sought to wear bulky VR computers on their faces to do basic tasks rather than the palm-sized pocket computers they already owned. Amazon, quite similarly, has come to terms with its own human-computer interfacing failure this year, although you probably wouldn't have realized it from how popular they are.

In this paper, we study item advertisements for small businesses. This application recommends prospective customers to specific items requested by businesses. From analysis, we found that the existing Recommender Systems (RS) were ineffective for small/new businesses with a few sales history. Training samples in RS can be highly biased toward popular businesses with sufficient sales and can decrease advertising performance for small businesses. We propose a meta-learning-based RS to improve advertising performance for small/new businesses and shops: Meta-Shop. Meta-Shop leverages an advanced meta-learning optimization framework and builds a model for a shop-level recommendation. It also integrates and transfers knowledge between large and small shops, consequently learning better features in small shops. We conducted experiments on a real-world E-commerce dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Meta-Shop outperformed a production baseline and the state-of-the-art RS models. Specifically, it achieved up to 16.6% relative improvement of Recall@1M and 40.4% relative improvement of nDCG@3 for user recommendations to new shops compared to the other RS models.

Centuries ago, the future of diplomacy was questioned due to technological progress – the invention of the radio, the telegraph and the public's intervention in the foreign policy domain. Meta's recent AI model has revived the conversation. CICERO has become the talk of the tech town and international chatbot diplomacy may not be far behind. Diplomacy is an art that even the most powerful AI was not able to master till CICERO made an appearance. Inspired by the famous Roman orator Cicero, Meta AI showed off its model that can beat several humans in the board game, Diplomacy, which requires strategic planning and verbal negotiations with several other players.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere right now. In truth, the fundamentals of AI and machine learning have been around for a long time. The first primitive form of AI was an automated checkers bot which was created by Cristopher Strachey from the University of Manchester, England, back in 1951. It's come a long way since then, and we're starting to see a large number of high profile use cases for the technology being thrust into the mainstream. Some of the hottest applications of AI include the development of autonomous vehicles, facial recognition software, virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri and a huge array of industrial applications in all industries from farming to gaming to healthcare.

Cyber Monday has come and gone, but if you're still looking to pick up a new smart display or two ahead of the holidays, a newer deal on Amazon's Echo Shows may be of interest: The retailer is currently offering a bundle that pairs its Echo Show 8 with the Kids edition of its Echo Show 5 for $70. We've seen the Echo Show 8 alone go for $70 for much of the last two months, but that still equals the lowest price we've tracked. Normally, it retails closer to $100. With this deal, you're effectively getting an Echo Show 5 Kids thrown in at no extra cost. That device is currently available on its own for $40, but its average street price over the last few months has sat closer to $60.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. While AI-driven digital agriculture tools can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers' trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market and accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results reveal that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

Amazon announced today the launch of "Create with Alexa," a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories. The company first revealed the feature in September. "Create with Alexa" launched in the U.S. today, November 29, across supported Echo Show devices and is available in English. To craft a story, a child says, "Alexa, make a story," and then answers prompts, the company explains in its blog post. The child selects from three themes: "space exploration," "underwater" or "enchanted forest," and then chooses the story's hero, a color scheme and adjectives like "silly," "happy" or "mysterious."

The holiday shopping season reaches its peak when Cyber Monday deals roll around. Sales are often better than on Black Friday, but with every retailer promising the best Cyber Monday discounts, it can be tricky to work out what deals to snag and when to pass. Luckily, we have done the hard work for you. WIRED reviewers try countless gadgets, tools, and digital delights of all kinds every week, and we have developed smart shopping tips and tricks to weed out fake discounts and bring you the real deals. We can say with confidence that these are the absolute best Cyber Monday deals you're going to find. You will find regular updates as products go out of stock and prices change, and we'll keep scouring to find more deals worth grabbing. Updated November 28 at 8 pm: We've added more deals, including a meal kit, a gimbal, and smart lights. We've also updated pricing and availability on deals. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out . We'll update this guide through Cyber Monday. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Just like upgrading the bed you sleep on, few things will improve your life like a good chair. If you park your body in front of a desk all day, it's a good idea to give the humble chair more attention. Some of our favorites are on sale right now. See our Best Office Chairs guide for more. Our top office chair pick is a bit cheaper right now. We've tested more than 35 office chairs in the past year and this is the one to get based on comfort, quality, adjustability, and price. At this price, you'd be hard-pressed to find a cheaper way to get seven points of adjustment. The only thing we don't like is that pet hair tends to cling, so keep a lint roller handy. The Zeph looks wonderful--there are dozens of color customizations--but the only adjustment you can make is to raise the seat up or down. You might think that would make for an uncomfortable chair, but it doesn't. This lack of adjustability is by design as the Zeph is designed to mold to your body. We do suggest you get the seat pad and arms, which add a smidge more comfort, though it does jack the price up a bit. The Zeph is compact, making it a great option for smaller spaces. The humble Hyken is our favorite budget office chair. It reclines, has a breathable mesh fabric on the back and seat, and it's sturdy. You even get a headrest and lumbar support. After more than three years of continuous sitting, WIRED reviewers say the mesh has compressed a bit, but it's still comfy. If you want to seriously up your home office game, the Embody is the chair to get. This price is for the titanium base, but you can save some money if you go for the graphite. It's stylish and comfortable with an array of knobs and levers that let you tailor the chair to your body like a bespoke suit.

A large number of empirical studies on applying self-attention models in the domain of recommender systems are based on offline evaluation and metrics computed on standardized datasets, without insights on how these models perform in real life scenarios. Moreover, many of them do not consider information such as item and customer metadata, although deep-learning recommenders live up to their full potential only when numerous features of heterogeneous types are included. Also, typically recommendation models are designed to serve well only a single use case, which increases modeling complexity and maintenance costs, and may lead to inconsistent customer experience. In this work, we present a reusable Attention-based Fashion Recommendation Algorithm (AFRA), that utilizes various interaction types with different fashion entities such as items (e.g., shirt), outfits and influencers, and their heterogeneous features. Moreover, we leverage temporal and contextual information to address both short and long-term customer preferences. We show its effectiveness on outfit recommendation use cases, in particular: 1) personalized ranked feed; 2) outfit recommendations by style; 3) similar item recommendation and 4) in-session recommendations inspired by most recent customer actions. We present both offline and online experimental results demonstrating substantial improvements in customer retention and engagement.

Making a house a home takes time, and often … a lot of money. Luckily, with Cyber Monday, there are plenty of great deals on all your household needs. Whether you're building up your kitchen appliances, syncing up all your smart home gadgets, or simply trying to clear the air, there's something on sale for you. Updated November 28: We've added the Ooni Koda, Stasher Bags, and smart lights and plugs. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out . We'll update this guide throughout Cyber Monday. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. This highly coveted countertop accessory is on sale yet again for Cyber Monday.