The Machine Learning Meets Econometrics (MLECON) workshop will serve as an interface for researchers from machine learning and econometrics to understand challenges and recognize opportunities that arise from the synergy between these two disciplines as well as to exchange new ideas that will help propel the fields. Our one-day workshop will consist of invited talks from world-renowned experts, shorter talks from contributed authors, a Gather.Town poster session, and an interdisciplinary panel discussion. To encourage cross-over discussion among those publishing in different venues, the topic of our panel discussion will be "Machine Learning in Social Systems: Challenges and Opportunities from Program Evaluation". It was designed to highlight the complexity of evaluating social and economic programs as well as shortcomings of current approaches in machine learning and opportunities for methodological innovation. These challenges include more complex environments (markets, equilibrium, temporal considerations) and behavior (heterogeneity, delayed effects, unobserved confounders, strategic response). Our team of organizers and program committees is diverse in terms of gender, race, affiliations, country of origin, disciplinary background, and seniority levels. We aim to convene a broad variety of viewpoints on methodological axes (nonparametrics, machine learning, econometrics) as well as areas of application.

Apple has released its latest firmware updates for iPhone and iPad. One of the more notable features Apple is adding in iOS 15.2 and iPadOS 15.2 is the Voice Plan for Apple Music. For $5 per month, subscribers can access the full library of songs, playlists and radio stations via Siri. On iPhone and iPad, you'll be able to access an App Privacy Report, which provides details of the data that Apple and third-party apps accessed during the previous seven days. The report shows how often apps use things like location, photos, camera, microphone and contacts, as well as their network activity. Also new is Apple's Digital Legacy feature.

A major challenge in collaborative filtering methods is how to produce recommendations for cold items (items with no ratings), or integrate cold item into an existing catalog. Over the years, a variety of hybrid recommendation models have been proposed to address this problem by utilizing items' metadata and content along with their ratings or usage patterns. In this work, we wish to revisit the cold start problem in order to draw attention to an overlooked challenge: the ability to integrate and balance between (regular) warm items and completely cold items. In this case, two different challenges arise: (1) preserving high quality performance on warm items, while (2) learning to promote cold items to relevant users. First, we show that these two objectives are in fact conflicting, and the balance between them depends on the business needs and the application at hand. Next, we propose a novel hybrid recommendation algorithm that bridges these two conflicting objectives and enables a harmonized balance between preserving high accuracy for warm items while effectively promoting completely cold items. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on movies, apps, and articles recommendations, and provide an empirical analysis of the cold-warm trade-off.

If you're still on the hunt for good tech gifts to give this year, you still have time to grab some that will arrive before the holidays. Apple's second-generation AirPods are on sale again for $100, while the Fitbit Charge 5 fitness tracker is back down to $130. Both Amazon's Kindle and a few Fire tablets are cheaper than usual, and the company's new smart thermostat is 20 percent off. On top of that, some of the best tech deals we saw for Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still available. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

Despite big improvements, particularly with the Siri remote, the 2021 Apple TV 4K is still a pretty expensive set-top streaming device at $179. If you've been waiting for a sale to pick one up, you can grab one right now for $150 at Amazon -- the lowest price we've seen yet. With an Engadget review score of 90, the 2021 Apple TV 4K is one of the best high-end streaming boxes available, especially if you're in the Apple ecosystem. The A12 Bionic processor delivers performance that's faster than ever, and it supports Dolby Atmos sound, 60 fps Dolby Vision, AirPlay 3 and screen mirroring. With HomeKit support, you can also ask Siri to do things like show you video feeds or open your smart lock.

Technology is progressively reshaping the domestic environment as we know it, enhancing home security and the overall ambient quality through smart connected devices. However, demographic shift and pandemics recently demonstrate to cause isolation of elderly people in their houses, generating the need for a reliable assistive figure. Robotic assistants are the new frontier of innovation for domestic welfare. Elderly monitoring is only one of the possible service applications an intelligent robotic platform can handle for collective wellbeing. In this paper, we present Marvin, a novel assistive robot we developed with a modular layer-based architecture, merging a flexible mechanical design with state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence for perception and vocal control. With respect to previous works on robotic assistants, we propose an omnidirectional platform provided with four mecanum wheels, which enable autonomous navigation in conjunction with efficient obstacle avoidance in cluttered environments. Moreover, we design a controllable positioning device to extend the visual range of sensors and to improve the access to the user interface for telepresence and connectivity. Lightweight deep learning solutions for visual perception, person pose classification and vocal command completely run on the embedded hardware of the robot, avoiding privacy issues arising from private data collection on cloud services.

Amazon is shutting down Alexa, its internet-tracking service that is unconnected to the identically named voice assistant. With the full name Alexa Internet, the service tracks how popular websites are by monitoring traffic as users navigate around. It does so with software that is installed on a small number of web browsers, or when websites decide to install that software on their website themselves. That information is used to pull rankings of the world's most popular websites, though they are not always reliable given the way the information is pulled together. Nonetheless, it has become a useful way of gauging the popularity of websites when their owners might not reveal that information, and is used on Wikipedia and other sources.

Products featured in this Mail Best article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, MailOnline may earn an affiliate commission. Smart home devices were a hit over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but if you missed out, we have some good news. Right now, you can buy two Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Gen) smart speakers for £29.99 - so you can treat yourself and a friend this Christmas. The same sell-out deal that was seen during Amazon's Black Friday sale, for a limited time, shoppers can score two Alexa devices for £29.99 using the promo code 2ECHODOT at checkout.

There has been tremendous progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for music, in particular for musical composition and access to large databases for commercialisation through the Internet. We are interested in further advancing this field, focusing on composition. In contrast to current black-box AI methods, we are championing an interpretable compositional outlook on generative music systems. In particular, we are importing methods from the Distributional Compositional Categorical (DisCoCat) modelling framework for Natural Language Processing (NLP), motivated by musical grammars. Quantum computing is a nascent technology, which is very likely to impact the music industry in time to come. Thus, we are pioneering a Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) approach to develop a new generation of intelligent musical systems. This work follows from previous experimental implementations of DisCoCat linguistic models on quantum hardware. In this chapter, we present Quanthoven, the first proof-of-concept ever built, which (a) demonstrates that it is possible to program a quantum computer to learn to classify music that conveys different meanings and (b) illustrates how such a capability might be leveraged to develop a system to compose meaningful pieces of music. After a discussion about our current understanding of music as a communication medium and its relationship to natural language, the chapter focuses on the techniques developed to (a) encode musical compositions as quantum circuits, and (b) design a quantum classifier. The chapter ends with demonstrations of compositions created with the system.

Inference of community structure in probabilistic graphical models may not be consistent with fairness constraints when nodes have demographic attributes. Certain demographics may be over-represented in some detected communities and under-represented in others. This paper defines a novel $\ell_1$-regularized pseudo-likelihood approach for fair graphical model selection. In particular, we assume there is some community or clustering structure in the true underlying graph, and we seek to learn a sparse undirected graph and its communities from the data such that demographic groups are fairly represented within the communities. Our optimization approach uses the demographic parity definition of fairness, but the framework is easily extended to other definitions of fairness. We establish statistical consistency of the proposed method for both a Gaussian graphical model and an Ising model for, respectively, continuous and binary data, proving that our method can recover the graphs and their fair communities with high probability.