LONDON – Dating apps including Grindr, OkCupid and Tinder leak personal information to advertising tech companies in possible violation of European data privacy laws, a Norwegian consumer group said in a report Tuesday. The Norwegian Consumer Council said it found "serious privacy infringements" in its analysis of how shadowy online ad companies track and profile smartphone users. The council, a government-funded nonprofit group, commissioned cybersecurity company Mnemonic to study 10 Android mobile apps. It found that the apps sent user data to at least 135 different third party services involved in advertising or behavioral profiling. "The situation is completely out of control," the council said, urging European regulators to enforce the continent's strict General Data Privacy Regulation, or GDPR.

Amazon Echo can do seven things that Google Home can't. Amazon and Google have long competed for the No. 1 smart speaker spot. And while Google Home has features that Echo doesn't, like listening to multiple commands at a time, Amazon still has a set of unique skills that Google can't yet do. Only Amazon Echo ($100 at Amazon) can guard your house and alert you if it hears something suspicious while you're gone. It also lets you know when your packages are out for delivery.

Sonos has finally made a portable wifi and Bluetooth speaker that sounds great – but it's not quite what most will have imagined. For years Sonos has made some of the very best wifi speakers, recently adding optional voice assistants from Google and Amazon. But they have never been truly wireless, needing to be plugged in and on your home wifi network. The Move changes that, essentially taking the excellent Sonos One and adding a battery to the bottom. But it comes at a hefty £399 price tag, although some retailers already have it at £329. The Move is slightly larger than the One.

Research at the Dell EMC and Intel HPC and AI Innovation Lab is demonstrating how organizations can build better, faster neural networks to drive recommendation engines. If you go to Netflix to look for the next movie you want to watch, a recommendation engine will give you suggestions tailored to your interests and past viewing experiences. When you visit a website, you're likely to see ads based on your browsing history and past purchases. If you shop on Amazon, you will get all kinds of recommendations based on your purchasing history and the purchasing history of other customers with similar interests. As Amazon explains, "We examine the items you've purchased, items you've told us you own, items you've rated, and items you've told us you like. Based on those interests, we make recommendations."

Algorithmic fairness in decision-making has been studied extensively in static settings where one-shot decisions are made on tasks such as classification. However, in practice most decision-making processes are of a sequential nature, where decisions made in the past may have an impact on future data. This is particularly the case when decisions affect the individuals or users generating the data used for future decisions. In this survey, we review existing literature on the fairness of data-driven sequential decision-making. We will focus on two types of sequential decisions: (1) past decisions have no impact on the underlying user population and thus no impact on future data; (2) past decisions have an impact on the underlying user population and therefore the future data, which can then impact future decisions. In each case the impact of various fairness interventions on the underlying population is examined.

While the earlier decade was all about data communication and internet proliferation, the economy of the next few years will thrive upon digitization of systems, where we will encounter implementation of smartness into everything i.e. smart home, smart city, smart appliances, smart retail, etc. The demand for smart home appliances is increasing due to numerous advancements and adoptions of digital technologies in everyday life. IoT solutions is one of the key focus areas of digital transformation projects in the consumer electronics and home appliances industry. With the addition of smart devices and appliances, and with capabilities in sensing, connectivity, and data transmission, people can interact, collect, and analyze highly valuable data to automate various operations at home, which were previously performed manually. Today, technology has evolved to such an extent that there's a possibility to design meaningful collaboration between humans and machines, primarily due to advancements in AI.

Google is everywhere at CES 2020. With the world's largest consumer electronics showcase under way here in Las Vegas, the search giant has dispatched an army of people clad in white uniforms to spread the gospel about the Google Assistant, the company's digital concierge software. The company built a massive fun house with slides and a ball pit. The words "Hey Google," the wake phrase for the software, are plastered all over buildings and the monorail in Las Vegas, the tech show's host city. It's a classic corporate marketing blitz, but it's also an apt metaphor for Google's grand ambition: to get its software all around you -- to fill up every inch of your life, from your commute to work to your Saturday morning vacuuming the house.

Kim Komando has all the answers about dating sites, political ads, Fire TV and more. Each week, I receive tons of questions from my listeners about tech concerns, new products and all things digital. Sometimes, choosing the most interesting questions to highlight is the best part of my job. This week, I received questions about whether any old tech is worth money to collectors, dating online, the Fire Stick, political ads and whether I shut down my app. Do you have a question you'd like to ask me?

Fortunately, an artificial intelligence-driven system in your vehicle is looking after you. The system automatically checks on your flight--still on schedule--and determines your chances of making it to the gate on time are slim. With your permission, it can proactively book an alternate flight. "That's the true virtual assistant in the future," says Gartner vice president and fellow David Cearley. "Rather than having conversational interfaces respond to discrete things, it understands the context and can respond to (your) intent."

Developed between 1966 and 72 at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), wobbly-gaited Shakey, the first robot to reason about its own actions, marked the beginning of artificial intelligence. Half a century later, Hanson Robotics introduced Sophia, a robot who grabbed headlines both for her spontaneity while being interviewed and her status as the first robot to be awarded citizenship. In the fifty years between the activation of these two robots, not only did technology advance but the goals of artificially intelligent machines also changed dramatically. In doing so, we may have made life more convenient in some ways, and in other ways may have paved the way for our own replacements. As robot technology improved, designers moved from physically powerful machines that freed up muscle and might to machines that could work alongside and with people.