Dive into the data science & machine learning behind Netflix's recommendation algorithms.

Car manufacturers are catching on the new tech wave. After the pandemic hit and social-distancing became our new normal, a personal vehicle became one of the safest ways to travel -- with proper sanitation, of course. And as we're all moving to a touchless future, the automotive industry is no exception. According to the study by Voicebot.ai While analysts from Frost & Sullivan predict that the importance of digital voice assistants in automotive branding will increasingly grow. We believe that in the next few years, voice technology will become one of the key drivers transforming the automotive industry.

The Cairo-based startup Elves has raised $2 million in seed funding from Egyptian VC fund Sawari Ventures. According to Menabytes, part of the investment was received in February and the other in July. Sawari Ventures was the investor in both cases. If we are to factor in this recent investment, the startup will have thus far raised $5 million. In 2017, Elves raised a record sum of investment in what was MENA region's largest seed round.

Dialogue systems, also called chatbots, are now used in a wide range of applications. However, they still have some major weaknesses. One key weakness is that they are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with handcrafted rules, and their knowledge bases (KBs) are also compiled by human experts. Due to the huge amount of manual effort involved, they are difficult to scale and also tend to produce many errors ought to their limited ability to understand natural language and the limited knowledge in their KBs. Thus, the level of user satisfactory is often low. In this paper, we propose to dramatically improve this situation by endowing the system the ability to continually learn (1) new world knowledge, (2) new language expressions to ground them to actions, and (3) new conversational skills, during conversation or "on the job" by themselves so that as the systems chat more and more with users, they become more and more knowledgeable and are better and better able to understand diverse natural language expressions and improve their conversational skills. A key approach to achieving these is to exploit the multi-user environment of such systems to self-learn through interactions with users via verb and non-verb means. The paper discusses not only key challenges and promising directions to learn from users during conversation but also how to ensure the correctness of the learned knowledge.

Stanford researchers hope their open virtual assistant Almond can increase competition and better protect privacy.

The task of session-based recommendation is to predict user actions based on anonymous sessions. Recent research mainly models the target session as a sequence or a graph to capture item transitions within it, ignoring complex transitions between items in different sessions that have been generated by other users. These item transitions include potential collaborative information and reflect similar behavior patterns, which we assume may help with the recommendation for the target session. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely Dual-channel Graph Transition Network (DGTN), to model item transitions within not only the target session but also the neighbor sessions. Specifically, we integrate the target session and its neighbor (similar) sessions into a single graph. Then the transition signals are explicitly injected into the embedding by channel-aware propagation. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DGTN outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis verifies the rationality of dual-channel item transition modeling, suggesting a potential future direction for session-based recommendation.

Recommendation has been a long-standing problem in many areas ranging from e-commerce to social websites. Most current studies focus only on traditional approaches such as content-based or collaborative filtering while there are relatively fewer studies in hybrid recommender systems. Due to the latest advances of deep learning achieved in different fields including computer vision and natural language processing, deep learning has also gained much attention in Recommendation Systems. There are several studies that utilize ID embeddings of users and items to implement collaborative filtering with deep neural networks. However, such studies do not take advantage of other categorical or continuous features of inputs. In this paper, we propose a new deep neural network architecture which consists of not only ID embeddings but also auxiliary information such as features of job postings and candidates for job recommendation system which is a reciprocal recommendation system. Experimental results on the dataset from a job-site show that the proposed method improves recommendation results over deep learning models utilizing ID embeddings.

Recommender systems should adapt to user interests as the latter evolve. A prevalent cause for the evolution of user interests is the influence of their social circle. In general, when the interests are not known, online algorithms that explore the recommendation space while also exploiting observed preferences are preferable. We present online recommendation algorithms rooted in the linear multi-armed bandit literature. Our bandit algorithms are tailored precisely to recommendation scenarios where user interests evolve under social influence. In particular, we show that our adaptations of the classic LinREL and Thompson Sampling algorithms maintain the same asymptotic regret bounds as in the non-social case. We validate our approach experimentally using both synthetic and real datasets.

There is no doubt that on the whole, the economic impacts from the lockdown and pandemic will be devastating. But while most leisure activities were throttled by the lockdown, others thrived -- just ask any of your friends that did Yoga With Adrienne (probably the same mates that brew their own kombucha). Tinder and Bumble usage alone spiked by over 20%, with Tinder registering 3 billion swipes on 28 March alone. However, the pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already in full force: finding love via apps. "Met online" is now the most common way that people report finding their significant other, streets ahead of boring old classics like "met in church" or "met in the neighbourhood". While there are a range of massively popular dating apps, including Bumble and Grindr, Tinder continues to be the most popular platform by a significant margin.

President Donald Trump said Saturday he has approved a deal in principle in which Oracle and Walmart will partner with the viral video-sharing app TikTok in the U.S., allowing the popular app to avoid a shutdown. "I have given the deal my blessing -- if they get it done that's great, if they don't that's okay too," Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for North Carolina. "I approved the deal in concept." The U.S. Department of Commerce announced it would delay the prohibition of U.S. transactions with TikTok until next Sunday. Shortly after Trump's comments, Oracle announced it was chosen as TikTok's secure cloud provider and will become a minority investor with a 12.5% stake.