Do you live in a Smart Home? Can you control your lighting, heating, and electronic devices with nothing more than a smartphone? It's no secret that demand for smart homes and devices has gone from novelty to necessity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants like Siri and Alexa have exploded in popularity and have been accepted into millions of homes. Many consumers have come to not only accept the help of these devices but have come to rely upon them. Can you even begin to imagine life today without social media, smartphones, or GPS systems?

Get the day's biggest stories sent direct to your inbox so you never miss a thing Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a staple of our daily lives, from Siri to Google Assistant which can control our phones, computers and even homes. The world of media has explored the advancement and potential dangers of rapidly advancing AI for decades, films such as Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey have touched on the themes of what happens when AI grows beyond human control. But how much does this affect our perception of AI and its involvement in our daily lives? Using data from Google Search Trends and Linkfluence, new research from Ebuyer has revealed that globally almost 3 million people had searched negative themes around AI online. The research discovered that the biggest search queries included "Can artificial intelligence be dangerous?"

AI is evolving on fast pace. Financial organizations are already using AI technologies to identify fraud and unusual transactions, personalize customer service, help make decisions on creditworthiness, using natural language processing on text documents, and for cybersecurity and general risk management. Over the past decades, banks have been improving their methods of interacting with customers. They have tailored modern technology to the specific character of their work. As an example, in the 1960s, the first ATMs were installed, and ten years later, there were already cards for doing transactions and payment.

Already, financial institutions are using AI technology to detect fraud and other unusual transactions, personalize services, make credit decisions, and use natural language processing on text documents. Banks have improved their customer service over the years. Modern technology has been tailored to their specific work. In 1960, the first ATMs were built. Ten years later, payment and transaction cards were available.

I've always been reticent to publish the performance of the Position trading system: I've even dismissed the record table for the subscribers, without any complaint from them. It should be complex to explain why, it's something intuitive, but it is related to my distrust in backtesting. First, I've always tested forward, not behind. The model, or as I call it now: r.Virgeel has taken shape during four years and is performing well. It is still under development: new ideas are passing as clouds at the moment.

Voice Assistant Technology had a market of its own even before the pandemic hit. Covid-19 and the fear that comes with it have just acted as a catalyst in the adaptation process and radically reshaped consumers' choices. If we go back to 2019, we see that home and voice-connected devices were moving towards becoming consumers' commerce command focus. The trend revolves around millennials who own six devices run on voice assistants except for their phones, and over 31% seem to have made purchases using these devices. With these numbers, we can deduce that the world was already moving towards a more Voice technology and AI-led market before'Global Pandemic' shook our lives.

These days, due to the increasing amount of information generated on the web, most web service providers try to personalize their services. Users also interact with web-based systems in multiple ways and state their interests and preferences by rating the provided items. This paper proposes a framework to predict users' demographic based on ratings registered by users in a system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the item ratings are employed for users' demographic prediction problems, which have extensively been studied in recommendation systems and service personalization. We apply the framework to the Movielens dataset's ratings and predict users' age and gender. The experimental results show that using all ratings registered by users improves the prediction accuracy by at least 16% compared with previously studied models. Moreover, by classifying the items as popular and unpopular, we eliminate ratings that belong to 95% of items and still reach an acceptable level of accuracy. This significantly reduces update costs in a time-varying environment. Besides this classification, we propose other methods to reduce data volume while keeping the predictions accurate.

"Start navigation, please," said the driver in the car with noisy passengers. Within seconds, a speech recognition system identified the command and activated the navigation system simply by reading the driver's lips. In another instance, a patient in a hospital with breathing tubes placed below their vocal cords, finds it difficult to speak. The helper uses SRAVI – a mobile app that uses Liopa's lip-reading technology – to scan the patient's face while they silently mouth a sentence. The Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted system then displays three probable statements of what the patient may be trying to say.

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Earlier this year, my co-author, Malay Upadhyay, and I released our new book, The AI Dilemma, a leadership guide to assess enterprise AI maturity and explore AI's impact in diverse industries. Over the past year, during COVID-19, I have been writing a series of blogs for CEOs and Board Directors and executive leadership teams to advance their knowledge in AI having develop a comprehensive AI set of skills that I called The Brain Trust. Over fifty skills were defined with examples of AI innovations. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Why I have been writing these blogs is to drive an increased sense of urgency of board directors and leadership teams to internalize that human civilization as we know it is changing at a clip that is unprecedented in human history.