I am not exactly a religious type of person, but I think there's a point where our humanity should be put at stake. It's been a year or so since I wrote my last post about Artificial Intelligence and its branches such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning. As a technology enthusiast I am fascinated and intrigued by the idea of a virtual assistant like Cortana from Halo or Mass Effect's VI (Virtual Intelligence). But as things are getting more and more advanced, the achievements look like we're enslaving ourselves to technological God we are creating ourselves. I am not exactly a religious type of person and I am not going to talk about whether it is good or wrong to have faith in Someone above us (which - for the record - I do), but I think there's a point where our humanity should be put at stake.

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With conversational commerce mushrooming throughout the retail world, it surely must have the feel of déjà vu for the iconic 1-800-Flowers.com Founded in 1976 and branded with its workhorse 1-800-Flowers phone number in 1986, the company can point to its penchant for speaking directly to its customers as a reason for its longevity -- first through the phone and then across the internet. The process of conversational commerce uses remarkably intuitive technology tools such as voice messaging and chatbot applications to facilitate seamless interactions between brands and shoppers to drive transactions or trigger service. Voice protocols are emerging as the dominant technique fueling conversational commerce, notably voice assistants such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. In addition, text-enabled chatbots are proliferating to help consumers through human-like conversations.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) is a common strategic model in today's marketing approach. It reflects the increasing popularity of customer centric marketing strategies over product differentiation strategies. The audience focused approach in marketing e.g. STP therefore goes hand in hand with marketing personas. The popularity of segmentation in the strategy derives on the one hand from past limitations of CRM and ad-tech systems as well as a dependency on human decision making in the STP process on the other hand.

The traditional offline approaches are no longer sufficient for building modern recommender systems in domains such as online news services, mainly due to the high dynamics of environment changes and necessity to operate on a large scale with high data sparsity. The ability to balance exploration with exploitation makes the multi-armed bandits an efficient alternative to the conventional methods, and a robust user segmentation plays a crucial role in providing the context for such online recommendation algorithms. In this work, we present an unsupervised and trend-responsive method for segmenting users according to their semantic interests, which has been integrated with a real-world system for large-scale news recommendations. The results of an online A/B test show significant improvements compared to a global-optimization algorithm on several services with different characteristics. Based on the experimental results as well as the exploration of segments descriptions and trend dynamics, we propose extensions to this approach that address particular real-world challenges for different use-cases. Moreover, we describe a method of generating traceable publishing insights facilitating the creation of content that serves the diversity of all users needs.

For most of human history, people have been good at predicting future technologies. Today however, predicting things even just 5 years ahead seems to end up futile. India is at the cusp of an e-commerce revolution. Although e-commerce has been making the rounds in the country for over a decade, it is in recent years that an appropriate ecosystem has begun to fall in place. Factors such as internet access, staggering penetration of mobile phones and robust investment have driven the growth of this industry and if current projections are anything to go by, India is en route to becoming the world's fastest growing e-commerce market.

Marko Karjnovic unveiled his ideas at The Museum of the Future as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai. The Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar (HIBA), will understand the feelings of people connected to it, take on their personas, exchange information with them and even become part of the fabric of their brains. Mr Karjnovic, who has produced the exhibit, explained: "It is very similar to the work of Elon Musk – it is an open source platform for humanity. "HIBA will have the ability to connect the minds of the most clever of us, combining those minds with everything it can find out practically and put it all together in hybrid intelligence."

Check out the "Text, Language, and Speech" sessions at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference in London, 14-17 October 2019. As companies begin to explore AI technologies, three areas in particular are garnering a lot of attention: computer vision, natural language applications, and speech technologies. A recent report from the World Intellectual Patent Office (WIPO) found that together these three areas accounted for a majority of patents related to AI: computer vision (49% of all patents), natural language processing (NLP) (14%), and speech (13%). Companies are awash with unstructured and semi-structured text, and many organizations already have some experience with NLP and text analytics. While fewer companies have infrastructure for collecting and storing images or video, computer vision is an area that many companies are beginning to explore.

It took senior editor Nicole Lee a bit of time to figure out where the Google Nest Hub (originally the Google Home Hub) fit into her life because it seemed too small to be used like a typical home assistant device. At a mere 7 inches, the smart display is meant to be a personal assistant for any room of the house. Because the Nest Hub lacks a camera, it's even good for the bedroom. Once Nicole started using the Nest Hub like a digital photo frame, albeit one with the smarts to control home automated devices that can also use Google apps, she began to see the strengths of this discreet commected display. In the end, she granted the Nest Hub a commendable score of 87. User reviewers, who always tend to score more harshly, gave the Nest Hub a passable score of 72.

Editor's Note: Updated at 6:34 pm EDT on October 21st to include Google's updated statement about the link between the discovered vulnerabilities and the Great Google Action Disappearance saga. Security Research Labs (SR Labs), "a Berlin-based hacking research collective and consulting think tank," revealed yesterday that it had created and received certification for several Alexa skills and Google Actions that exploited security vulnerabilities in the voice assistants. The firm discussed two specific attacks in a blog post related to phishing and eavesdropping. The former demonstrated how a developer, using the standard Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) or Actions on Google (AoG) software development kits, could develop a voice app that tricked a user into thinking that Alexa or Google Assistant were asking for their password to provide a system update. Using similar developer tools, the latter attack could leave a microphone open after a skill seemingly had stopped and conduct passive listening for private information.