Recommendation techniques are important approaches for alleviating information overload. Being often trained on implicit user feedback, many recommenders suffer from the sparsity challenge due to the lack of explicitly negative samples. The GAN-style recommenders (i.e., IRGAN) addresses the challenge by learning a generator and a discriminator adversarially, such that the generator produces increasingly difficult samples for the discriminator to accelerate optimizing the discrimination objective. However, producing samples from the generator is very time-consuming, and our empirical study shows that the discriminator performs poor in top-k item recommendation. To this end, a theoretical analysis is made for the GAN-style algorithms, showing that the generator of limit capacity is diverged from the optimal generator. This may interpret the limitation of discriminator's performance. Based on these findings, we propose a Sampling-Decomposable Generative Adversarial Recommender (SD-GAR). In the framework, the divergence between some generator and the optimum is compensated by self-normalized importance sampling; the efficiency of sample generation is improved with a sampling-decomposable generator, such that each sample can be generated in O(1) with the Vose-Alias method. Interestingly, due to decomposability of sampling, the generator can be optimized with the closed-form solutions in an alternating manner, being different from policy gradient in the GAN-style algorithms. We extensively evaluate the proposed algorithm with five real-world recommendation datasets. The results show that SD-GAR outperforms IRGAN by 12.4% and the SOTA recommender by 10% on average. Moreover, discriminator training can be 20x faster on the dataset with more than 120K items.

Every day, Every Hour, Every Minute, we are saying few simple words like "Hey Google" or "Hey Alexa" or "Hey Siri" to know something or to get our works done. "Hey Google, How do you work?" or "Hey Alexa, Why are you so smart?" or "Hey Siri, What's behind your success?" It's simply because as a client we never bother about these things. In any application clients are the ones who needs to be satisfied and in today's world these assistants are so much smarter that there is no reason to think or ask these things as a client. But as a Tech Enthusiast, or as a guy from CS background it's always too much fascinating to know about behind the scene technologies, these popular companies are using to make these smart assistants capable of extraordinary performance.

Amazon's Echo devices are a runaway success. Tap or click here for a features comparison lineup of the various Amazon Echo devices [2020 Chart]. If you already own an Echo, prepare to be shocked. Several of my conversations Alexa recorded had nothing to do with playing music, getting news, or ordering items on Amazon. I talked about a real estate transaction, college courses online, and when the pandemic might end.

After the stock market closed today, Five9 announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) company Inference Solutions. The purchase price is $172 million, $148 million in cash and $24 million when certain bookings targets are met. Inference brings 550 customers, among them several joint Five9 customers -- including Chick-fil-A and Wyndham Hotels. Inference was founded in 2005, spun out from Telstra Research Labs -- think of it as the Australian version of Bell Labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has additional offices in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia.

The Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight camera performed beautifully in all of our tests. Touting a 160-degree viewing angle and 2K video with high-def resolution, Arlo's Pro 4 offers a wider range of view and higher video quality than the Nest Cam Outdoor, our previous No. 1 pick, and is our new recommendation for the best outdoor smart security camera. Arlo's video quality is just as clear at night as it is during the day thanks to the camera's color night vision output. It also has a built-in spotlight that illuminates when motion is detected and a smart siren that can be triggered remotely or automatically. We found the installation process to be fairly uncomplicated, though a 2.4 GHz WiFi connection is required for setup. There are no wires to fiddle with, as this camera includes a mount that can easily be screwed in on the exterior of your home. Before you place it, we suggest giving it a good charge right out of the box using the included magnetic charging cable.

We live in an exciting time, especially in innovation, progress, technology, and commerce. Some of the latest tech inventions, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, are making a tremendous impact on every industry. Voice assistants powered by AI have already transformed the eCommerce trend. The eCommerce giants such as Amazon continue to fuel this trend as they compete for the market share. Voice interfacing is advancing at an exceptional rate in healthcare and banking industries to keep pace with consumers' demands.

How likely you are to trust a self-driving car or advice from Siri? A University of Kansas interdisciplinary team led by relationship psychologist Omri Gillath has published a new paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior showing people's trust in artificial intelligence (AI) is tied to their relationship or attachment style. The research indicates for the first time that people who are anxious about their relationships with humans tend to have less trust in AI as well. Importantly, the research also suggests trust in artificial intelligence can be increased by reminding people of their secure relationships with other humans. Grand View Research estimated the global artificial-intelligence market at $39.9 billion in 2019, projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 42.2% from 2020 to 2027.

As consequential as these statements are, the truth is nobody can predict just how profound this emerging technology of AI will be. For example, just look at Amazon no one could have foreseen what started out as an online bookstore could have grown to be one of the world's most powerful and valuable companies in the history of the earth. More specifically, how the "Amazon Effect" has grown it's supporting ecosystem comprised of manufactures, logics and even suppliers like the card board box industry -- all of which have greatly benefited from Amazon shipments. What we can be certain of is because of new emerging technology like AI, the rate of change will only increase. And the need for human intelligence, creativity and ingenuity will be even more valuable and in demand in the future. However, here in lies the paradox that AI technology is not only fueling the pace of change but will also make us more intelligent. And it is with this thesis that I not only wrote a book about AI's profound capabilities, but actually used AI to co-author the book, as an example of how AI will be our intelligent assistant moving forward. Throughout my career as a creative technologist, I have always been fascinated with this very topic; what happens when human creativity and ingenuity meet and is then amplified by technology. In the pursuit of'walking the walk' I've leveraged AI to help co-author much of the narrative. In doing so I dramatically reduced the time taken to create this book. As a metaphor for how AI is giving us superhuman powers, and for the purposes of this book, we have given AI a name: Aimé, which is derived from the French for'beloved' (bien aimé) and is also coincidentally a combination of AI me. Aimé reflects the goal of this book -- to show that AI will become your beloved co-creator and your intelligent personal assistant going forward.

The beginning of this week brought a number of solid deals on headphones, tablets and other gadgets. And then Best Buy began its first early Black Friday sale and we saw a bunch of our favorite devices receive steep discounts. Best Buy's sale lasts through November 1st and Amazon has matched a couple of the best prices. We gathered some of the highlights below, including others from the week including Apple's AirPods Pro for $200 and Lenovo's Chromebook Duet with extra storage for $230. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today.

Polk Audio manages to tease some relatively impressive virtual 3D audio out of its 2.1-channel MagniFi soundbar, which makes the speaker's subpar bass response all the more disappointing. Equipped with built-in Chromecast and Google Assistant support, the MagniFi 2 is easy to set up, and Polk Audio's custom digital sound processing delivers subtle surround and height effects without undue harshness. The $499 MagniFi 2 also comes with three HDMI inputs, a pleasant surprise for a soundbar in this price range. But while it's unquestionably an upgrade over standard TV speakers, the MagniFi 2's otherwise crisp audio is undermined by muddy bass from the wireless subwoofer, robbing the sound of punchiness. Polk Audio has three lines of soundbars.