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 Personal Assistant Systems


A Conversational Digital Assistant for Intelligent Process Automation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as the leading approach to automate tasks in business processes. Moving away from back-end automation, RPA automated the mouse-click on user interfaces; this outside-in approach reduced the overhead of updating legacy software. However, its many shortcomings, namely its lack of accessibility to business users, have prevented its widespread adoption in highly regulated industries. In this work, we explore interactive automation in the form of a conversational digital assistant. It allows business users to interact with and customize their automation solutions through natural language. The framework, which creates such assistants, relies on a multi-agent orchestration model and conversational wrappers for autonomous agents including RPAs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on a loan approval business process and a travel preapproval business process.


Graph Convolutional Network for Recommendation with Low-pass Collaborative Filters

arXiv.org Machine Learning

\textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}onvolutional \textbf{N}etwork (\textbf{GCN}) is widely used in graph data learning tasks such as recommendation. However, when facing a large graph, the graph convolution is very computationally expensive thus is simplified in all existing GCNs, yet is seriously impaired due to the oversimplification. To address this gap, we leverage the \textit{original graph convolution} in GCN and propose a \textbf{L}ow-pass \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{F}ilter (\textbf{LCF}) to make it applicable to the large graph. LCF is designed to remove the noise caused by exposure and quantization in the observed data, and it also reduces the complexity of graph convolution in an unscathed way. Experiments show that LCF improves the effectiveness and efficiency of graph convolution and our GCN outperforms existing GCNs significantly. Codes are available on \url{https://github.com/Wenhui-Yu/LCFN}.


Exploring Machine Learning Basics

#artificialintelligence

Machine learning applications can be found in virtually every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Our product recommendations, social media feeds, email spam filters, traffic predictions, virtual personal assistants, and more, are all driven by machine learning. Companies are increasingly on the hunt for talented machine learning practitioners, so thereโ€™s no time like the present to gain those highly sought-after skills!


Sonic Adds Amazon Alexa Skill to Ordering

#artificialintelligence

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Anatomy of an AI System digital poster. - Victoria & Albert Museum - Search the Collections

#artificialintelligence

The Anatomy of an AI project, created and designed by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, consists of a website, digital publication, physical publication and digital map. Published online in September 2018, the project responds to the technical and human infrastructure behind Amazon's voice assistant'Alexa' and the Amazon Echo device that it is enabled by. Often with the case of proprietary or closed technology such as the Amazon Alexa, it is difficult to see the infrastructure and technology behind these and other similar voice assistants. The Anatomy of an AI System project shows in detail โ€“ a result of extensive research by technology and social science researchers, as well as Joler and Crawford โ€“ the complex journey through which digitally-enabled consumer devices come to exist in society. This digital poster, to be printed at a minimum scale of 220x360 cm, is a contemporary record of obscured, inaccessible digital and corporate processes.


Coronavirus pandemic has sparked interest in online swinging, dating app data shows

FOX News

The number of messages sent per user in New York City between April and June was three times that of San Diego, the app reported. The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a surge in online swingers across the country -- with New York City topping the list, according to a report. Threesome dating app "3Fun" reported a steady uptick in the number of messages sent between its 721,927 active users since lockdowns began in March. "Social distancing makes offline meetings tough โ€ฆ That means most open-minded people are trying to meet new friends online during the pandemic," spokeswoman Jennifer White said in a statement. Dating app "3Fun" reported a steady uptick in the number of messages sent between its 721,927 active users since lockdowns began in March.


Insightful Assistant: AI-compatible Operation Graph Representations for Enhancing Industrial Conversational Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Advances in voice-controlled assistants paved the way into the consumer market. For professional or industrial use, the capabilities of such assistants are too limited or too time-consuming to implement due to the higher complexity of data, possible AI-based operations, and requests. In the light of these deficits, this paper presents Insightful Assistant---a pipeline concept based on a novel operation graph representation resulting from the intents detected. Using a predefined set of semantically annotated (executable) functions, each node of the operation graph is assigned to a function for execution. Besides basic operations, such functions can contain artificial intelligence (AI) based operations (e.g., anomaly detection). The result is then visualized to the user according to type and extracted user preferences in an automated way. We further collected a unique crowd-sourced set of 869 requests, each with four different variants expected visualization, for an industrial dataset. The evaluation of our proof-of-concept prototype on this dataset shows its feasibility: it achieves an accuracy of up to 95.0% (74.5%) for simple (complex) request detection with different variants and a top3-accuracy up to 95.4% for data-/user-adaptive visualization.


Apple Acquires More AI Startups Than Any Other Tech Company

#artificialintelligence

The market for artificial intelligence has exploded over the last decade. While platforms such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana have dominated the market, these companies have not been the source of that growth. Instead, stiff competition between the biggest corporations has led to aggressive acquisitions of AI startups. According to data compiled by CB Insights, there have been a total of 635 artificial intelligence acquisitions between 2010 and September 2019. Those purchases also increased six times over from 2013 to 2018, with 166 acquisitions in 2018 alone--a 38 percent increase year over year.


Apple Acquires More AI Startups Than Any Other Tech Company

#artificialintelligence

The market for artificial intelligence has exploded over the last decade. While platforms such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana have dominated the market, these companies have not been the source of that growth. Instead, stiff competition between the biggest corporations has led to aggressive acquisitions of AI startups. According to data compiled by CB Insights, there have been a total of 635 artificial intelligence acquisitions between 2010 and September 2019. Those purchases also increased six times over from 2013 to 2018, with 166 acquisitions in 2018 alone--a 38 percent increase year over year.


This is the best portable smart speaker we've ever tested

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

This speaker pumps out a lot of sound for its size, and it manages to balance portability and durability surprisingly well. The swivel handle on top makes it very easy to carry, and with its water-resistant design, the Portable Smart Speaker is at home at the beach or poolside. The Portable Smart Speaker is water-resistant. Here are the Portable Smart Speaker's Specs: The Portable Smart Speaker's round design allows for a 360-degree sound field, which is perfect for great sound in pretty much any space. Despite its compact size, this speaker puts out a surprising amount of volume, but it does begin to lose a little clarity as it approaches its max.