Social distancing is still in full effect for most of us--and that means your steady stream of video calls with friends and family probably won't slow down anytime soon. It's easy to use your smartphone or laptop to see your friends and family, but Facebook Portal, a smart video display that features Amazon Alexa, makes quarantine video chat awesome with its augmented reality effects and other cool features. The Portal Plus has a respectable speaker and a display that swivels to change between portrait and landscape modes. Facebook Portal is a smart video display screen that closely resembles a picture frame. The device uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to make video calls, but the person you're trying to call doesn't need a Portal to answer your call--just a Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp account.

The whistleblower who exposed in 2019 that Apple contractors listened to users' Siri recordings without their knowledge or consent has gone public to protest the lack of action taken against the technology giant. In a letter, sent to all European data protection regulators, Thomas le Bonniec said that Apple had conducted a "massive violation of the privacy of millions of citizens." He wrote that although news of the case had already gone public, the technology giant "has not been subject to any kind of investigation to the best of my knowledge." Mr Le Bonniec, who was hired by one of Apple's subcontractors in Ireland called Globe Technical Services, had to listen to recordings from users and correct transcription errors. Listening to hundreds of recortings from Apple's iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, many of them were taken "outside of any activation of Siri" – meaning that users were not aware of the action.

As recommender systems have become more widespread and moved into areas with greater social impact, such as employment and housing, researchers have begun to seek ways to ensure fairness in the results that such systems produce. This work has primarily focused on developing recommendation approaches in which fairness metrics are jointly optimized along with recommendation accuracy. However, the previous work had largely ignored how individual preferences may limit the ability of an algorithm to produce fair recommendations. Furthermore, with few exceptions, researchers have only considered scenarios in which fairness is measured relative to a single sensitive feature or attribute (such as race or gender). In this paper, we present a re-ranking approach to fairness-aware recommendation that learns individual preferences across multiple fairness dimensions and uses them to enhance provider fairness in recommendation results. Specifically, we show that our opportunistic and metric-agnostic approach achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and fairness than prior re-ranking approaches and does so across multiple fairness dimensions.

Are you searching for a little smart home inspiration? On Amazon, there are several deals that will satisfy your tech cravings. The mega retailer has cut prices on a variety of bestselling smart devices including the Fire TV Stick, Fire 7 Kids Edition Tablet, Amazon Echo and more. But be quick, these low prices always prove popular so you don't want to wait around. Ahead are our top picks of the best smart device deals on Amazon.

A former Apple contractor who pulled the curtain on the tech giant last summer, exposing an inside program that listens to user's Siri recordings, has made himself known to the world. Thomas le Bonniec worked under a Siri'grading project' that gathered snippets of audio in order to improve the smart assistant's accuracy. Last year, le Bonniec revealed to The Guardian that while working for Apple he heard private and sometimes intimate recordings including medical discussions, criminal activity, sex and official business talks. The whistleblower had initially remained anonymous, but has revealed himself in protest against the lack of action taken against Apple for'violating fundamental human rights' - and he has done so with an open letter to European privacy regulators stating his concerns. Former Apple contractor, Thomas le Bonniec, who pulled the curtain on the tech giant last summer, exposing an inside program that listens to user's Siri recordings, has made himself known to the world'There's not much vetting of who works there, and the amount of data that we're free to look through seems quite broad,' le Bonniec told the Guardian in July.

Facebook is launching what it's calling a "universal product recognition model" that uses artificial intelligence to identify consumer goods, from furniture to fast fashion to fast cars. It's the first step toward a future where the products in every image on its site can be identified and potentially shopped for. "We want to make anything and everything on the platform shoppable, whenever the experience feels right," Manohar Paluri, head of Applied Computer Vision at Facebook, told The Verge. Product recognition is the first in a slew of AI-powered updates coming to its e-commerce platforms in the near future, says the company. Eventually, these will combine AI, augmented reality, and even digital assistants to create what it calls a "social-first" shopping experience.

Don't worry if you missed out on the last time the HomePod was on sale -- the deal is back. Best Buy is once again selling Apple's smart speaker for $200, or a full $100 off the usual price. At that cost, it could easily make sense if you're in an Apple-centric household and want a speaker to lift your mood or control your smart home. The HomePod has long been one of our top picks for sound quality, punching well above its weight (or rather, size) -- especially now that you can create stereo pairs and groups. And while the initial feature set was underwhelming, to put it mildly, Apple has gone some length to improve things with multi-user support, audio handoffs, live radio and Spotify voice control.

Robotic process automation is spreading across banking and financial services. The origins of automation extend back to 1745, when English blacksmith Edmund Lee patented the rotating fantail that keeps a windmill's sails pointed into the wind. The first completely automated industrial process emerged toward the end of the 1700s, when American inventor Oliver Evans developed the automatic flour mill. Fast-forward to the 2000s and the era of Digital Disruption 2.0: The world today is experiencing the impact of another monumental breakthrough – the emergence of robotic process automation (RPA). RPA uses software to automate repetitive processes that humans would otherwise do, freeing these people for higher value work.

Of all the smart displays on the market right now, many of you went for the Echo Show 5. Amazon's mid-sized model features a sunrise alarm, quality sound and of course, the Alexa assistant. When senior editor Nicole Lee reviewed the Echo Show 5, she was impressed with the small device's ability to compete with larger options like the Lenovo Smart Clock or Google's Nest Hub. We asked Echo Show owners why they went with the 5-inch version from Amazon, what their favorite features were and what it was like to watch videos on the device. Here's what they had to say. Our reviewer Nicole pointed out that the smaller screen on the Echo Show 5 makes it ideal for the kitchen and the bedroom, and that is indeed where most of our users placed the device.

If you're just starting out with smart speakers or want multiple tech-savvy clocks around the house, this might be the deal you're looking for. You can buy two Echo Show 5 smart displays for the price of one at Amazon for $90 if you enter the code SHOW52PK at checkout. Best Buy is offering a similar deal if you add two of the screens to your cart. This is a daily deal at Best Buy, so you'll likely need to act quickly at both sites if you want to take advantage of the sale. A previous deal dropped the price of an individual unit down to $50, but this is a steeper overall discount if you're in the market for two.