A Cinema Challenge hackathon was held from 14 to 22 November of 2020. It was dedicated to creating solutions for online theatre sweet.tv. I managed to create a prize-winning solution for challenge 2 and decided to share my methodology. The task was to predict top-5 tv-programs for each user based on his view history. TV-program was considered watched if the user watched over 80% of it and did not change the channel.

Bring up Artificial Intelligence in a room and people's minds wander to shiny robots who will take our jobs or a lot of science fiction. If we look at the Oxford dictionary definition of Artificial Intelligence, this is what we get: 'the study and development of computer systems that can copy intelligent human behaviour.' For the majority of society, this means very little, however if you work or are surrounded in the tech industry, you have our personal definitions. The limitation of the definition that Artificial Intelligence is primarily based on computers imitating human intelligence does not give us a broad understanding of what Artificial Intelligence actually is? What's the difference between types of AI? What type of AI is Siri?

Apple's been on a shopping spree in a bid to make Siri smarter, according to a new report by GlobalData. The market research firm says the tech giant bought more AI companies than anyone else between 2016 and 2020. The second biggest AI acquirer was Irish consultancy Accenture. But the rest of the top five were all based in the US. Google grabbed the third spot on the list, followed by Microsoft and Facebook.

Apple is the leading buyer of companies in the global artificial intelligence space, according to data shared today by GlobalData. From 2016 to 2020, Apple acquired the highest number of AI companies, beating out Accenture, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, all of whom also had a high number of AI acquisitions. Over the course of the last several years, Apple has bought companies like Emotient, Turi, Glimpse, RealFace, Shazam, SensoMotoric, Silk Labs, Drive.ai, Laserlike, SpectralEdge, Voysis, XNOR.ai, and more, all with the aim of improving the AI and machine learning capabilities of its products and services. Apple does not make all of its acquisitions public, so it's possible there are other artificial intelligence companies that Apple has purchased that have gone under the radar.

Yesterday's hearing with the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter was as messy as you might have predicted -- and we'll get into that below. But I want to start today with voice assistants. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and the rest know a lot. But they barely remember anything, which curtails exactly how much they can truly assist with your life beyond music controls, timers and reminding you exactly what shows you've seen Joel Kinnaman in. A new feature spotted for Google Assistant on Android called Memory could transform it into the assistant we need, however.

For your capstone project, you'll tackle a real-world data problem from end to end. Develop a pitch and problem statement, source and collect relevant data, conduct an exploratory data analysis, and build a predictive model. You'll document and share your findings through a presentation, technical report, and non-technical summary. Throughout this Accelerator Course you'll also compile a portfolio of projects designed to reinforce what you've learned in each unit. Not only that, You will get to Work on Projects from Topics such as Data Analytics, Data Visualization, Machine Learning, Time-series Forecasting, Deep Learning, Recommendation Engines, NLP, Chatbots, Web Scraping, Computer Vision, etc.

Over the last few years, Voice Assistants have become ubiquitous with the popularity of Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri, Cortana, and others. These are the most well-known examples of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This class of applications starts with a clip of spoken audio in some language and extracts the words that were spoken, as text. For this reason, they are also known as Speech-to-Text algorithms. Of course, applications like Siri and the others mentioned above, go further.

Google is working on a new feature for Assistant on Android called "Memory" that could transform it into into a handy organizer, according to a recent APK spotted by 9to5Google. The idea is that you can save screen content, images, reminders, ideas and more in one place, then find it again through a smart search function. According to the app screens, you can store items in Memory using a verbal Google Assistant command or use a home screen shortcut. Those include articles, books, contacts, events, flights, hotels, images, movies, music, notes, photos, places, playlists, products, recipes, reminders, restaurants, screenshots, shipments, TV shows, videos, and websites. It will also save screenshots, URLs, location and other information happening in context.

Increasingly, companies of all sizes are seeing AI as a table-stakes solution for ensuring consistent, valuable support for customers from all backgrounds. Artificial Intelligence is at the core of any company's strategy for self-service and customer support. The AI environment also assists employees in accessing information quickly and supports business leaders in collecting and analysing larger amounts of data. Let's explore just some of the ways that AI in the contact centre can improve your CX. When used correctly, Artificial Intelligence tools like Agent Assistants and Chatbots can transform the brand and customer experience.

AI is changing every industry and business function, which results in increased interest in AI, its subdomains, and related fields such as machine learning and data science as seen below. However, we also note that since COVID-19 outbreak, interest in AI, as measured by Google queries about AI, has been stable / possibly declining. This may be due to increased interest in COVID-19 and its effects during this period. However, this depends on the specific industry and applications, we see increased interest in AI in manufacturing during the same period. As of 2018, 37% of organizations were looking to define their AI strategies. There has been significant progress since then and according to a recent O'Reilly survey, 85% of organizations are using AI. To integrate AI into your own business, you need to identify how AI can serve your business, possible use cases of AI in your business. Marketing can be summarized as reaching the customer with the right offer, the right message, at the right time, through the right channel, while continually learning. To achieve success, companies can leverage AI-powered tools to get familiar with their customers better, create more compelling content, and perform personalized marketing campaigns. AI can provide accurate insights and suggest smart marketing solutions that would directly reflect on profits with customer data. Marketing analytics: AI systems learn from, analyze, and measure marketing efforts. These solutions track media activity and provide insights into PR efforts to highlight what is driving engagement, traffic, and revenue. As a result, companies can provide better and more accurate marketing services to their customers. Besides PR efforts, AI-powered marketing analytics can lead companies to identify their customer groups more accurately.