"I have nothing to hide" was once the standard response to surveillance programs utilizing cameras, border checks, and casual questioning by law enforcement. Privacy used to be considered a concept generally respected in many countries with a few changes to rules and regulations here and there often made only in the name of the common good. Things have changed, and not for the better. China's Great Firewall, the UK's Snooper's Charter, the US' mass surveillance and bulk data collection -- compliments of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Edward Snowden's whistleblowing -- Russia's insidious election meddling, and countless censorship and communication blackout schemes across the Middle East are all contributing to a global surveillance state in which privacy is a luxury of the few and not a right of the many. As surveillance becomes a common factor of our daily lives, privacy is in danger of no longer being considered an intrinsic right. Everything from our web browsing to mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) products installed in our homes have the potential to erode our privacy and personal security, and you cannot depend on vendors or ever-changing surveillance rules to keep them intact. Having "nothing to hide" doesn't cut it anymore. We must all do whatever we can to safeguard our personal privacy. Taking the steps outlined below can not only give you some sanctuary from spreading surveillance tactics but also help keep you safe from cyberattackers, scam artists, and a new, emerging issue: misinformation. Data is a vague concept and can encompass such a wide range of information that it is worth briefly breaking down different collections before examining how each area is relevant to your privacy and security. A roundup of the best software and apps for Windows and Mac computers, as well as iOS and Android devices, to keep yourself safe from malware and viruses. Known as PII, this can include your name, physical home address, email address, telephone numbers, date of birth, marital status, Social Security numbers (US)/National Insurance numbers (UK), and other information relating to your medical status, family members, employment, and education. All this data, whether lost in different data breaches or stolen piecemeal through phishing campaigns, can provide attackers with enough information to conduct identity theft, take out loans using your name, and potentially compromise online accounts that rely on security questions being answered correctly. In the wrong hands, this information can also prove to be a gold mine for advertisers lacking a moral backbone.

By this point in the pandemic, it's safe to say most of us would be happy if we didn't have to attend another Zoom call ever again. But with COVID-19 still an ongoing concern and companies like Google moving to hybrid work weeks, it's fair to say video meetings will likely be a consistent fixture of most jobs for the foreseeable future. Audio transcription company Otter thinks it has a potential solution for Zoom fatigue. It's introducing a new software feature called Otter Assistant that will attend Zoom calls on your behalf and take notes for you. The company says the tool works with all Zoom meetings, even ones where you're not the host.

Conversational agents (CAs) represent an emerging research field in health information systems, where there are great potentials in empowering patients with timely information and natural language interfaces. Nevertheless, there have been limited attempts in establishing prescriptive knowledge on designing CAs in the healthcare domain in general, and diabetes care specifically. In this paper, we conducted a Design Science Research project and proposed three design principles for designing health-related CAs that embark on artificial intelligence (AI) to address the limitations of existing solutions. Further, we instantiated the proposed design and developed AMANDA - an AI-based multilingual CA in diabetes care with state-of-the-art technologies for natural-sounding localised accent. We employed mean opinion scores and system usability scale to evaluate AMANDA's speech quality and usability, respectively. This paper provides practitioners with a blueprint for designing CAs in diabetes care with concrete design guidelines that can be extended into other healthcare domains.

Amazon's Echo Frames are compatible with most prescription lenses, but they only come with clear lenses out of the box -- until now, anyway. The retail giant has introduced three new options to choose from if you're looking to buy a pair of the Alexa-powered eyewear. You can get it with polarized blue mirror sunglass lenses starting today, and starting on June 9th, you can get a pair with blue-light-filtering lenses and polarized classic sunglass lenses. The Echo Frames have open-ear audio near your temples, so you can listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts, as well as take calls without blocking the world around you. Since it also gives you hands-free access to Alexa, you can simply issue voice commands to control it, such as "Alexa, play my followed podcasts on Amazon Music" or "Alexa, resume my audiobook."

If your home is kitted out with Amazon Echo devices, you can now use the "drop in" feature to talk to all of them at the same time. This essentially brings a quick and easy intercom to your home. Up until now, you could use Amazon's "drop in" feature to send a voice message to only one other Alexa-powered device. Let's say from the Amazon Echo in your living room to the Amazon Echo Dot in your kitchen. You could "drop in" then start a conversation that works both ways.

When it came to talking about the harmful effects of social media on kids, I used to feel like the Will Smith character in I, Robot: "Why won't anyone listen to me?" After I wrote a book about girls and social media in 2016, I got a lot of pushback from people accusing me of being a Luddite or raising a moral panic. That changed over time, once a deluge of studies sadly connected social media use in girls with rising rates of anxiety and depression, the loss of self-esteem, even suicide. Today, I don't think anyone would argue that social media is without significant dangers for children and teens. Nancy Jo Sales is the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Life of Teenagers and Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno.

Performance of recommender systems (RS) relies heavily on the Many large scale e-commerce platforms (such as Etsy, Overstock, amount of training data available. This poses a chicken-and-egg etc) and online content platforms (such as Spotify, Overstock, Disney, problem for early-stage products, whose amount of data, in turn, Netflix, etc) have such a large inventory of items that showcasing relies on the performance of their RS. On the other hand, zero-shot all of them in front of their users is simply not practical. In learning promises some degree of generalization from an old dataset particular, in the online content category of businesses, it is often to an entirely new dataset. In this paper, we explore the possibility seen that users of their service do not have a crisp intent in mind of zero-shot learning in RS. We develop an algorithm, dubbed ZEro-unlike in the retail shopping experience where the users often have Shot Recommenders (ZESRec), that is trained on an old dataset a crisp intent of purchasing something. The need for personalized and generalize to a new one where there are neither overlapping recommendations therefore arises from the fact that not only it is users nor overlapping items, a setting that contrasts typical crossdomain impractical to show all the items in the catalogue but often times RS that has either overlapping users or items. Different users of such services need help discovering the next best thing from categorical item indices, i.e., item ID, in previous methods, -- be it the new and exciting movie or be it a new music album or ZESRec uses items' natural-language descriptions (or description even a piece of merchandise that they may want to consider for embeddings) as their continuous indices, and therefore naturally future buying if not immediately.

Considering processes of a business in a recommender system is highly advantageous. Although most studies in the business process analysis domain are of descriptive and predictive nature, the feasibility of constructing a process-aware recommender system is assessed in a few works. One reason can be the lack of knowledge on process mining potential for recommendation problems. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and analyze the published studies on process-aware recommender system techniques in business process management and process mining domain. A systematic review was conducted on 33 academic articles published between 2008 and 2020 according to several aspects. In this regard, we provide a state-of-the-art review with critical details and researchers with a better perception of which path to pursue in this field. Moreover, based on a knowledge base and holistic perspective, we discuss some research gaps and open challenges in this field.

LG has announced the pricing and availability of its 2021 soundbar lineup for the US. Since the models play audio from televisions via TV Sound Mode Share, you can enjoy the benefits of LG TVs' AI Sound Pro feature. The capability uses artificial intelligence to analyze and automatically adjust sounds, depending on the content genre (news, music or cinema) you're listening to. Most of the soundbars in the lineup are now available from retailers, including the most expensive options: the SP9YA and the SP8YA. Both models are compatible with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Siri, enabling voice control.

Amazon's Alexa has a voice familiar to millions: calm, warm, and measured. But like most synthetic speech, its tones have a human origin. There was someone whose voice had to be recorded, analyzed, and algorithmically reproduced to create Alexa as we know it now. Amazon has never revealed who this "original Alexa" is, but journalist Brad Stone says he tracked her down, and she is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist based in Boulder, Colorado. The claim comes from Stone's upcoming book on the tech giant, Amazon Unbound, an excerpt of which is published here in Wired.