You're probably reading this on a browser built by Apple or Google. If you're on a smartphone, it's almost certain those two companies built the operating system. You probably arrived from a link posted on Apple News, Google News or a social media site like Facebook. And when this page loaded, it, like many others on the Internet, connected to one of Amazon's ubiquitous data centers. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- known as the Big 4 -- now dominate many facets of our lives. But they didn't get there alone. They acquired hundreds of companies over decades to propel them to become some of the most powerful tech behemoths in the world.

Artificial intelligence-based algorithms can influence people to prefer one political candidate – or a would-be partner – over another, according to researchers. "We are worried that everyone is using recommendation algorithms all the time, but there was no information on how effective those recommendation algorithms are," says Helena Matute at the University of Deusto in Spain. Her work with her colleague Ujué Agudo, also at the University of Deusto, was designed to investigate the issue. The researchers carried out a series of four experiments in which participants were told they were interacting with an algorithm that would judge their personality. The'algorithm' did not actually do this: it was a mock algorithm that responded in the same way regardless of the information participants gave it.

Smart home applications have been growing and companies keep developing ideas to make these applications more appealing to customers. It is still an open market and a good environment for more creation and development. Our team is aiming to participate in that industry by developing new solutions and providing more convenience to users. Our project uses Hexabitz modules for our hardware circuit. Hexabitz has been developing various modules that can be integrated together to build a complete PCB (printed circuit board) that can be programmed and controlled using software platforms.

"Hey Siri, can you find me a murderer for hire?" Ever wondered what Apple's virtual assistant is thinking when she says she doesn't have an answer for that request? Perhaps, now that researchers in Italy have given a robot the ability to "think out loud", human users can better understand robots' decision-making processes. "There is a link between inner speech and subconsciousness [in humans], so we wanted to investigate this link in a robot," said the study's lead author, Arianna Pipitone from the University of Palermo. The researchers programmed a robot called Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics, with the ability to vocalise its thought processes.

Music recommendation algorithms could be amplifying the industry's existing gender bias problem, according to a study that proposes a new method allowing greater exposure for female artists. The existance of a gender bias in the music industry is not unknown. For instance, a study of the top five music charts in the UK between the years 1960-1995 showed how popular music is affected by a large gender inequality with a bias in listening preferences towards male artists. A recent analysis of music festivals found that lineups are heavily skewed towards male performers and this bias is also said to be prevalent in music streaming apps like Spotify. A growing number of people use streaming platforms to listen to music, and these apps use algorithms to recommend songs based on the users' listening habits.

Apple sold 2.4 million smart speakers in the U.S. market during first quarter of 2021, according to the market research firm Omdia, beating Google's sales by 100,000 units during the same period. The firm estimates the new Apple HomePod mini accounted for 91 percent of Apple's U.S. smart speaker sales during that time. Apple's share of smart speaker shipments in the U.S. market reached 17.8 percent during the first quarter, a 9 percent increase year over year. But Omdia estimates there were 75 million smart speakers based on Google Assistant on the market at the end of 2020, compared to just 10 million based on Apple's Siri. And Amazon dominates both of those competitors, with a current installed base of 141 million smart speakers using its Alexa voice assistant.

As a highly data-driven application, recommender systems could be affected by data bias, resulting in unfair results for different data groups, which could be a reason that affects the system performance. Therefore, it is important to identify and solve the unfairness issues in recommendation scenarios. In this paper, we address the unfairness problem in recommender systems from the user perspective. We group users into advantaged and disadvantaged groups according to their level of activity, and conduct experiments to show that current recommender systems will behave unfairly between two groups of users. Specifically, the advantaged users (active) who only account for a small proportion in data enjoy much higher recommendation quality than those disadvantaged users (inactive). Such bias can also affect the overall performance since the disadvantaged users are the majority. To solve this problem, we provide a re-ranking approach to mitigate this unfairness problem by adding constraints over evaluation metrics. The experiments we conducted on several real-world datasets with various recommendation algorithms show that our approach can not only improve group fairness of users in recommender systems, but also achieve better overall recommendation performance.

Apple has announced a second-generation Apple TV 4K with a new and unambigously designed Siri remote--at last, there's no more holding the remote the wrong way! The new streamer is powered by Apple's A12 Bionic processor, which will enable high frame rate HDR (high dynamic range at 60 frames per second) on streaming services that offer it. The new Siri remote, and an intriguing color-balance feature that is part of tvOS 14.5, will also be available on the first-gen Apple TV 4K as well as the Apple TV HD. One thing that hasn't changed about the new Apple TV 4K is the price: Yes, it's still a whopping $199 for the 64GB model and $179 for the 32GB version, with the updated models slated to ship in May following an April 30 pre-order date. The new Siri remote costs $59, or it can be purchased with an Apple TV HD for $149--that's about $50 higher than the most expensive 4K players from Amazon, Roku, and other competitors.

Now that every adult in the US is eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, Amazon wants to make it as simple as possible to get your shots. Alexa now helps you find vaccination sites just by saying "where can I get a COVID vaccine?" to your smart speaker or other supporting device. You can specify a city if you want more than nearby results, and you can call a given site if you have questions about appointments. Alexa is also useful for learning about vaccine availability and eligibility in over 85 countries, and you can find COVID-19 testing locations much like you would vaccinations. There's a good chance you'll use a mapping app first, but there's no doubt this is convenient -- you can ask about those potentially life-saving vaccine doses while you're busy making breakfast.

The hit US reality show is getting its own UK version - hosted by Julie Adenuga and Oobah Butler.