There was once a time when you needed a sketchbook, colours, brushes, and a whole lot of artistic talent to create a piece of art. Now, you just need to cultivate the skill of feeding the right command to a computer programme, and voila, you get your very own piece of art. And no, you do not need to be a coder for this. Welcome to the world of artificial intelligence, also known as AI. While this one is a very specific instance, we have been using this technology inadvertently quite often. How do you think Apple's Siri responds to your voice commands, or chatbots on various websites interact with you?

In their debut on the MLPerf industry-standard AI benchmarks, NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs set world records in inference on all workloads, delivering up to 4.5x more performance than previous-generation GPUs. The results demonstrate that Hopper is the premium choice for users who demand utmost performance on advanced AI models. Additionally, NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin module for AI-powered robotics continued to deliver overall leadership inference performance across all MLPerf tests: image and speech recognition, natural language processing and recommender systems. The H100, aka Hopper, raised the bar in per-accelerator performance across all six neural networks in the round. It demonstrated leadership in both throughput and speed in separate server and offline scenarios.

Recommender systems usually learn user interests from various user behaviors, including clicks and post-click behaviors (e.g., like and favorite). However, these behaviors inevitably exhibit popularity bias, leading to some unfairness issues: 1) for items with similar quality, more popular ones get more exposure; and 2) even worse the popular items with lower popularity might receive more exposure. Existing work on mitigating popularity bias blindly eliminates the bias and usually ignores the effect of item quality. We argue that the relationships between different user behaviors (e.g., conversion rate) actually reflect the item quality. Therefore, to handle the unfairness issues, we propose to mitigate the popularity bias by considering multiple user behaviors. In this work, we examine causal relationships behind the interaction generation procedure in multi-behavior recommendation. Specifically, we find that: 1) item popularity is a confounder between the exposed items and users' post-click interactions, leading to the first unfairness; and 2) some hidden confounders (e.g., the reputation of item producers) affect both item popularity and quality, resulting in the second unfairness. To alleviate these confounding issues, we propose a causal framework to estimate the causal effect, which leverages backdoor adjustment to block the backdoor paths caused by the confounders. In the inference stage, we remove the negative effect of popularity and utilize the good effect of quality for recommendation. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which enhances fairness without sacrificing recommendation accuracy.

Graph neural network (GNN) based methods have saturated the field of recommender systems. The gains of these systems have been significant, showing the advantages of interpreting data through a network structure. However, despite the noticeable benefits of using graph structures in recommendation tasks, this representational form has also bred new challenges which exacerbate the complexity of mitigating algorithmic bias. When GNNs are integrated into downstream tasks, such as recommendation, bias mitigation can become even more difficult. Furthermore, the intractability of applying existing methods of fairness promotion to large, real world datasets places even more serious constraints on mitigation attempts. Our work sets out to fill in this gap by taking an existing method for promoting individual fairness on graphs and extending it to support mini-batch, or sub-sample based, training of a GNN, thus laying the groundwork for applying this method to a downstream recommendation task. We evaluate two popular GNN methods: Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), which trains on the entire graph, and GraphSAGE, which uses probabilistic random walks to create subgraphs for mini-batch training, and assess the effects of sub-sampling on individual fairness. We implement an individual fairness notion called \textit{REDRESS}, proposed by Dong et al., which uses rank optimization to learn individual fair node, or item, embeddings. We empirically show on two real world datasets that GraphSAGE is able to achieve, not just, comparable accuracy, but also, improved fairness as compared with the GCN model. These finding have consequential ramifications to individual fairness promotion, GNNs, and in downstream form, recommender systems, showing that mini-batch training facilitate individual fairness promotion by allowing for local nuance to guide the process of fairness promotion in representation learning.

Digital assistants (DA) have evolved from basic tasks like placing online food orders, checking the weather, getting sports updates, and listening to music in the car. Digital assistants are becoming increasingly sophisticated! Many more use cases are guiding various market innovations in various verticals. Technological advances, increasing demand for outsourced assistance, increased focus on enhancing customer loyalty, the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, and improvements in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the Internet of Things are all driving the global digital assistant sector (IoT). By 2024, the number of digital assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world's population!

We live in a rapidly changing world. A study of nature leads me to believe adaptation is the key to survival. Whatever you pursue make sure you keep current with current events and how they may affect your plans. From Siri to google assistant, self-driving cars, and ridesharing cabs like Uber, it's Artificial Intelligence that makes businesses intelligent and smarter. Have you ever imagined how cab booking apps estimate the price of your ride even before you take it?

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The connector leverages eGain's unique BYOB (Bring Your Own Bot) architecture, allowing business users to easily plug in the Watson Assistant into the eGain platform with no coding. Per Gartner, less than 10% of customer service journeys are fulfilled using self-service, which is why it is critical to integrate chatbots with human-assisted service channels such as live chat. The eGain Connector for Watson Assistant improves customer, agent, and business experiences at once. When customers escalate from Watson to human-assisted chat, their context is passed to the contact center agent so that they do not need to repeat information to the agent. Agents get to see interactions that customers have already had with Watson before they start their conversation with the customer.

In recent years, the Neurosymbolic framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance. This success is due to its stellar performance combined with attractive properties, such as learning and reasoning. The new emerging Neurosymbolic field is currently experiencing a renaissance, as novel frameworks and algorithms motivated by various practical applications are being introduced, building on top of the classical neural and reasoning problem setting. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of significant recent developments in real-world applications of Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, we introduce a taxonomy of common Neurosymbolic applications and summarize the state-of-the-art for each of those domains. Furthermore, we identify important current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to the future of this burgeoning field.

Fairness-aware recommender systems that have a provider-side fairness concern seek to ensure that protected group(s) of providers have a fair opportunity to promote their items or products. There is a ``cost of fairness'' borne by the consumer side of the interaction when such a solution is implemented. This consumer-side cost raises its own questions of fairness, particularly when personalization is used to control the impact of the fairness constraint. In adopting a personalized approach to the fairness objective, researchers may be opening their systems up to strategic behavior on the part of users. This type of incentive has been studied in the computational social choice literature under the terminology of ``bossiness''. The concern is that a bossy user may be able to shift the cost of fairness to others, improving their own outcomes and worsening those for others. This position paper introduces the concept of bossiness, shows its application in fairness-aware recommendation and discusses strategies for reducing this strategic incentive.