From Amazon to Netflix to Pinterest, recommendation systems are the cornerstone of a majority of the modern-day billion-dollar industries. However, building recommender systems is not a straightforward task. What if we can build them in a few lines? Dropping the nitty-gritty details and concentrating on implementing algorithms with more ease is what any data scientist would like to get their hands on. Abstraction is a common trait amongst popular machine learning libraries or frameworks like TensorFlow.

Artificial intelligence serves a number of purposes in contact centers. It can automate routine processes, provide live chat in the form of virtual agents or chatbots to address customer queries, help deliver personalized experiences and provide predictive analytics, among other things. Each of these AI functions helps enhance both the employee and customer experience, and many CX leaders are taking a closer look at how it can help in their companies. The driving force behind this movement is the increase in contact center interaction volume as COVID-19 shows no end in sight, moving customers from physical to virtual buying patterns and requiring help from live customer service agents. CX leaders have reported many changes in their contact centers, including the need for more agents to support customer demand over both the phone and digital channels, and replacing in-person experiences with virtual ones -- driving even more traffic to the contact center.

Many applications of machine learning on discrete domains, such as learning preference functions in recommender systems or auctions, can be reduced to estimating a set function that is sparse in the Fourier domain. In this work, we present a new family of algorithms for learning Fourier-sparse set functions. They require at most $nk - k \log_2 k + k$ queries (set function evaluations), under mild conditions on the Fourier coefficients, where $n$ is the size of the ground set and $k$ the number of non-zero Fourier coefficients. In contrast to other work that focused on the orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard transform, our novel algorithms operate with recently introduced non-orthogonal Fourier transforms that offer different notions of Fourier-sparsity. These naturally arise when modeling, e.g., sets of items forming substitutes and complements. We demonstrate effectiveness on several real-world applications.

Speech Recognition is the ability of a machine or program to identify words and phrases in spoken language and convert them to textual information. You have probably seen it on Sci-fi, and personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant, and other virtual assistants that interact with through voice. In order to understand your voice these virtual assistants need to do speech recognition. Speech Recognition is a complex process, so I'm not going to teach you how to train a Machine Learning/Deep Learning Model to do that. Instead, I will instruct you how to do it using google speech recognition API.

There is no surprise that artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm. The technology is increasingly being used across diverse business functions and revolutionizing all aspects of life and work. AI enables computers to learn from a voluminous amount of data to perform menial and complex tasks. Its applications have been of great value for both an organization or an individual, assisting them in doing their work with ease and getting things done on time. As AI is different from rule-based automation solutions and uses machine learning and NLP, this tech is expected to be as important for humans as electricity and the internet.

In the United States, more than half of all households are expected to have a digital assistant or smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo by 2022, and many people already today use these devices for shopping. In the Nordic region, however, relatively few consumers have purchased or plan to purchase an AI-based digital assistant. Those Nordic residents who do have one primarily use assistants to play music, do research and manage to-do lists. Yet when it comes to online shopping, the purchasing journey is to a high degree driven by convenience. In the next few years, AI solutions that save customers time and energy are expected to become increasingly common.

Recommender Systems are especially challenging for marketplaces since they must maximize user satisfaction while maintaining the healthiness and fairness of such ecosystems. In this context, we observed a lack of resources to design, train, and evaluate agents that learn by interacting within these environments. For this matter, we propose MARS-Gym, an open-source framework to empower researchers and engineers to quickly build and evaluate Reinforcement Learning agents for recommendations in marketplaces. MARS-Gym addresses the whole development pipeline: data processing, model design and optimization, and multi-sided evaluation. We also provide the implementation of a diverse set of baseline agents, with a metrics-driven analysis of them in the Trivago marketplace dataset, to illustrate how to conduct a holistic assessment using the available metrics of recommendation, off-policy estimation, and fairness. With MARS-Gym, we expect to bridge the gap between academic research and production systems, as well as to facilitate the design of new algorithms and applications.

Many latent-variable applications, including community detection, collaborative filtering, genomic analysis, and NLP, model data as generated by low-rank matrices. Yet despite considerable research, except for very special cases, the number of samples required to efficiently recover the underlying matrices has not been known. We determine the onset of learning in several common latent-variable settings. For all of them, we show that learning $k\times k$, rank-$r$, matrices to normalized $L_{1}$ distance $\epsilon$ requires $\Omega(\frac{kr}{\epsilon^2})$ samples, and propose an algorithm that uses ${\cal O}(\frac{kr}{\epsilon^2}\log^2\frac r\epsilon)$ samples, a number linear in the high dimension, and nearly linear in the, typically low, rank. The algorithm improves on existing spectral techniques and runs in polynomial time. The proofs establish new results on the rapid convergence of the spectral distance between the model and observation matrices, and may be of independent interest.

Media services providers, such as music streaming platforms, frequently leverage swipeable carousels to recommend personalized content to their users. However, selecting the most relevant items (albums, artists, playlists...) to display in these carousels is a challenging task, as items are numerous and as users have different preferences. In this paper, we model carousel personalization as a contextual multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays, cascade-based updates and delayed batch feedback. We empirically show the effectiveness of our framework at capturing characteristics of real-world carousels by addressing a large-scale playlist recommendation task on a global music streaming mobile app. Along with this paper, we publicly release industrial data from our experiments, as well as an open-source environment to simulate comparable carousel personalization learning problems.

A long-standing goal of task-oriented dialogue research is the ability to flexibly adapt dialogue models to new domains. To progress research in this direction, we introduce DialoGLUE (Dialogue Language Understanding Evaluation), a public benchmark consisting of 7 task-oriented dialogue datasets covering 4 distinct natural language understanding tasks, designed to encourage dialogue research in representation-based transfer, domain adaptation, and sample-efficient task learning. We release several strong baseline models, demonstrating performance improvements over a vanilla BERT architecture and state-of-the-art results on 5 out of 7 tasks, by pre-training on a large open-domain dialogue corpus and task-adaptive self-supervised training. Through the DialoGLUE benchmark, the baseline methods, and our evaluation scripts, we hope to facilitate progress towards the goal of developing more general task-oriented dialogue models.