The development of fair machine learning models that effectively avert bias and discrimination is an important problem that has garnered attention in recent years. The necessity of encoding complex relational dependencies among the features and variables for competent predictions require the development of fair, yet expressive relational models. In this work, we introduce Fair-A3SL, a fairness-aware structure learning algorithm for learning relational structures, which incorporates fairness measures while learning relational graphical model structures. Our approach is versatile in being able to encode a wide range of fairness metrics such as statistical parity difference, overestimation, equalized odds, and equal opportunity, including recently proposed relational fairness measures. While existing approaches employ the fairness measures on pre-determined model structures post prediction, Fair-A3SL directly learns the structure while optimizing for the fairness measures and hence is able to remove any structural bias in the model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned model structures when compared with the state-of-the-art fairness models quantitatively and qualitatively on datasets representing three different modeling scenarios: i) a relational dataset, ii) a recidivism prediction dataset widely used in studying discrimination, and iii) a recommender systems dataset. Our results show that Fair-A3SL can learn fair, yet interpretable and expressive structures capable of making accurate predictions.

Online dating going mainstream hasn't made the potential dangers of meeting up with an internet stranger any less alarming. That's why Match.com is rolling out a check-in feature that lets users shoot over their date details to trusted confidantes, including the name of the person they're meeting up with, the location of the date and the time. Once check-in is turned on, users will receive an automated text message during their date asking them if everything is going alright and if they'd like to notify their previously listed emergency contacts if it's not. Match.com is letting users notify emergency contacts if their date is showing any red flags. Check-in sends users a text that users can reply to and send trusted contacts their date's name, the location of the date and the time The user can then reply'yes' to the text message and all three contacts will be notified.

Smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo, have been adopted by millions of users. However, the privacy impacts of smart speakers have not been well examined. We investigate the privacy leakage of smart speakers under an encrypted traffic analysis attack, referred to as voice command fingerprinting. In this attack, an adversary eavesdrops encrypted voice traffic from and to a smart speaker and infers which voice command a user says without decrypting encrypted traffic. We design our attacks based on neural networks and collect two large-scale datasets on Amazon Echo and Google Home by using an automatic traffic crawler.

If you go down to the farm today, you'll likely find it packed with sensors, drones and remote management systems run by iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. In fact, we're only one or two Siri Shortcuts away from voice-controlled farms equipped with remotely controlled irrigation, livestock and crop management solutions and blockchain-based crop lifecycle analysis tools. Most of this technology exists, but cost constrains deployment. Leading the digital transformation of agriculture are apps, such as: Agrellus, an online marketplace for agriculture, xarvio Scouting App for better crop management, FieldNET Mobile to control water pivots remotely, Yara ImageIT, which turns your iPhone into a crop nutrient testing system, AgSense, and GrainTruckPlus. There are many more apps for agriculture available at the App Store – including Tudder, the "Tinder for farm animals."

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most important location-based services helping people discover interesting venues or services. However, the extreme user-POI matrix sparsity and the varying spatio-temporal context pose challenges for POI systems, which affects the quality of POI recommendations. To this end, we propose a translation-based relation embedding for POI recommendation. Our approach encodes the temporal and geographic information, as well as semantic contents effectively in a low-dimensional relation space by using Knowledge Graph Embedding techniques. To further alleviate the issue of user-POI matrix sparsity, a combined matrix factorization framework is built on a user-POI graph to enhance the inference of dynamic personal interests by exploiting the side-information. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Recommender system is an essential component of web services to engage users. Popular recommender systems model user preferences and item properties using a large amount of crowdsourced user-item interaction data, e.g., rating scores; then top-$N$ items that match the best with a user's preference are recommended to the user. In this work, we show that an attacker can launch a data poisoning attack to a recommender system to make recommendations as the attacker desires via injecting fake users with carefully crafted user-item interaction data. Specifically, an attacker can trick a recommender system to recommend a target item to as many normal users as possible. We focus on matrix factorization based recommender systems because they have been widely deployed in industry. Given the number of fake users the attacker can inject, we formulate the crafting of rating scores for the fake users as an optimization problem. However, this optimization problem is challenging to solve as it is a non-convex integer programming problem. To address the challenge, we develop several techniques to approximately solve the optimization problem. For instance, we leverage influence function to select a subset of normal users who are influential to the recommendations and solve our formulated optimization problem based on these influential users. Our results show that our attacks are effective and outperform existing methods.

In today's business era, AI chatbots are redefining the way pharma companies interact and engage with their clients. These chatbots mimic human conversation via text or auditory means which is a huge opportunity for the pharma industry to have a one-to-one conversation with their customers, doctors, and patients. Apart from that, by using intelligent virtual assistants, pharmaceutical companies can build a strong relationship with doctors and patients by communicating with them and assisting them directly. The two main areas within this industry that will drastically benefit from developing a pharma chatbot are R&D and marketing. By developing a chatbot, a pharma company can have a virtual digital assistant to provide information to users on various topics, such as how to respond to inquiries on certain health conditions, a complex drug procedure, and the appropriate method of using a certain medical device.

An important problem in multiview representation learning is finding the optimal combination of views with respect to the specific task at hand. To this end, we introduce NAM: a Neural Attentive Multiview machine that learns multiview item representations and similarity by employing a novel attention mechanism. NAM harnesses multiple information sources and automatically quantifies their relevancy with respect to a supervised task. Finally, a very practical advantage of NAM is its robustness to the case of dataset with missing views. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NAM for the task of movies and app recommendations. Our evaluations indicate that NAM outperforms single view models as well as alternative multiview methods on item recommendations tasks, including cold-start scenarios.

Smart speakers, like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, have come under fire over the past few years for'listening' to its owner's conversations. Now, a team of scientists believe they have developed the ultimate weapon to block the devices' spying abilities - a wearable that jams the microphone. Dubbed the'bracelet of silence', the chunky bracelet is fitted with 23 speakers around it that emit ultrasonic signals that drown out any speech of the wearer. While these ultrasonic signals are undetectable to human ears, they leak into the audible spectrum after being captured by the microphones, producing a jamming signal inside the microphone circuit disrupts voice recordings. Scientists developed the ultimate weapon to block the devices' spying abilities - a wearable that jams the microphone.

A former Amazon Executive revealed he switches off his Alexa smart speaker whenever he wants a'private moment' as he doesn't want it listening in. Robert Frederick, a former manager at Amazon Web Services, told BBC Panorama he always turns it off during personal and particularly sensitive conversations. Last year Amazon was forced to admit that some conversations recorded by virtual assistant Alexa were listened to and transcribed by humans. Amazon says human staff listen to less than on per cent of conversations to check for accuracy and the information is made anonymous before they see it. Amazon's Alexa is being placed in an increasing number of devices including televisions, smart speakers and screens The investigative journalism programme is exploring Amazon's rise from online bookstore to tech giant as well as the way it collects data from its customers.