The giant TVs and high-end laptops might get the lion's share of attention on Black Friday, but the smaller tech devices are worth checking out too. We put the cap at $50 and came up with over 20 deals on inexpensive gadgets along with a few peripherals and accessories you'll need for this year's higher-end buys. Some gadgets are going for all-time lows, like the new Echo Dot. Others, like the Google Nest Mini and the Roku Streaming Stick 4K are half off their usual price. We added a few storage cards that are seeing big price cuts too, since you can never have too many of those.

Black Friday is finally here and if you haven't started your holiday shopping, now's the best time to do so. While we've seen some of our favorite gadgets go on sale since the start of November, today's the day you're almost guaranteed to find the best prices of the year across laptops, TVs, speakers, tablets, wearables and much more. But, as usual, the sheer volume of deals across the web today makes it even harder to pick out the gems among them. There are absolutely tech "deals" out there today that are not worth your time. To make ease the burden of deal-hunting, we collected the best Black Friday tech deals we could find right here.

Sonos makes some of our favorite speakers because you can seamlessly connect several throughout your home, all without having to wrangle with pesky cables. It started its Black Friday sales early, but they're still going strong. You'll find discounts on some of our favorite speakers, soundbars, and subwoofers. The sale runs through November 28. It's a great opportunity to build a surround sound setup.

Meta has trained an AI agent to play a boardgame that involves chatting with other players to persuade them to support its strategies -- and then betraying them. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says that its Cicero AI may have widespread applications in the near future including developing smarter virtual assistants with the combined use of technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and strategic reasoning, according to a blog post released by the company. In a research article in the academic journal Science, Meta said its Cicero AI achieved human-level performance at the strategy boardgame Diplomacy in an online league where it played 40 games against 82 humans, ranking in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game. Diplomacy pits seven players against one another for control of a map of Europe. Each turn begins with players negotiating with one another for support for their plans and concludes with them simultaneously trying to execute their moves.

Have you ever wanted to build a customized recommender system for yourself? If Yes! Then this is the course you are looking for. Have you ever thought how YouTube adjust your feed as per your favorite content? Why is your Netflix recommending you your favorite TV shows? Have you ever wanted to build a customized recommender system for yourself?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed how modern applications interact with us, and machine learning has driven the modernization of various processes and systems. We all know that artificial intelligence has strengthened its hold on how we interact with computers. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Hey Google are now natural parts of our life, and references to them regularly appear in mainstream entertainment, such as TV shows and advertisements. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are also a natural part of our evolving ecosystem. People understand, for example, that the "social media algorithm"--the infamous algorithm that decides who sees what social media content--is driven by artificial intelligence.

Black Friday may still be a few hours away, but we're already seeing a bunch of great deals on our favorite tech. This comes after a slow trickle of deals popping up across the web ever since the start of November. While we don't have the supply chain issues we did last year, it's still a good idea to start your holiday shopping as early as possible -- even if it's just a few hours before the biggest sale day of the year. The sooner you check off items from your list, the sooner they'll arrive and you'll be ready to go for the holidays. To make things easier for you, we've collected the best early Black Friday tech deals here so you don't have to go searching for them.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been widely used by mobile phone intelligent assistants to accomplish tasks such as calendar scheduling or hotel reservation. Current TOD systems usually focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then they would call back-end APIs designed for TODs to perform the task. However, this API-based architecture greatly limits the information-searching capability of intelligent assistants and may even lead to task failure if TOD-specific APIs are not available or the task is too complicated to be executed by the provided APIs. In this paper, we propose a new TOD architecture: GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system (GUI-TOD). A GUI-TOD system can directly perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. Furthermore, we release META-GUI, a dataset for training a Multi-modal convErsaTional Agent on mobile GUI. We also propose a multi-model action prediction and response model, which show promising results on META-GUI. The dataset, codes and leaderboard are publicly available.

Predicting conversion rate (e.g., the probability that a user will purchase an item) is a fundamental problem in machine learning based recommender systems. However, accurate conversion labels are revealed after a long delay, which harms the timeliness of recommender systems. Previous literature concentrates on utilizing early conversions to mitigate such a delayed feedback problem. In this paper, we show that post-click user behaviors are also informative to conversion rate prediction and can be used to improve timeliness. We propose a generalized delayed feedback model (GDFM) that unifies both post-click behaviors and early conversions as stochastic post-click information, which could be utilized to train GDFM in a streaming manner efficiently. Based on GDFM, we further establish a novel perspective that the performance gap introduced by delayed feedback can be attributed to a temporal gap and a sampling gap. Inspired by our analysis, we propose to measure the quality of post-click information with a combination of temporal distance and sample complexity. The training objective is re-weighted accordingly to highlight informative and timely signals. We validate our analysis on public datasets, and experimental performance confirms the effectiveness of our method.

Today, we're announcing CICERO, the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. Diplomacy has been viewed as a nearly impossible challenge in AI because it requires players to understand people's motivations and perspectives, make complex plans and adjust strategies, and use language to convince people to form alliances. CICERO marks the beginning of a new era for AI that can collaborate with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language processing, and the learnings from technology like this could one day lead to intelligent assistants that can collaborate with people. While CICERO is only capable of playing Diplomacy, the technology behind it is relevant to many other applications. For example, current AI assistants can complete simple question-answer tasks, like telling you the weather -- but what if they could hold a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill?