We propose RecSim, a configurable platform for authoring simulation environments for recommender systems (RSs) that naturally supports sequential interaction with users. RecSim allows the creation of new environments that reflect particular aspects of user behavior and item structure at a level of abstraction well-suited to pushing the limits of current reinforcement learning (RL) and RS techniques in sequential interactive recommendation problems. Environments can be easily configured that vary assumptions about: user preferences and item familiarity; user latent state and its dynamics; and choice models and other user response behavior. We outline how RecSim offers value to RL and RS researchers and practitioners, and how it can serve as a vehicle for academic-industrial collaboration.

In many real-world applications, e.g. recommendation systems, certain items appear much more frequently than other items. However, standard embedding methods---which form the basis of many ML algorithms---allocate the same dimension to all of the items. This leads to statistical and memory inefficiencies. In this work, we propose mixed dimension embedding layers in which the dimension of a particular embedding vector can depend on the frequency of the item. This approach drastically reduces the memory requirement for the embedding, while maintaining and sometimes improving the ML performance. We show that the proposed mixed dimension layers achieve a higher accuracy, while using 8X fewer parameters, for collaborative filtering on the MovieLens dataset. Also, they improve accuracy by 0.1% using half as many parameters or maintain baseline accuracy using 16X fewer parameters for click-through rate prediction task on the Criteo Kaggle dataset.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere: personal digital assistants answer our questions, robo-advisors trade stocks for us, and driverless cars will someday take us where we want to go. AI has penetrated our lives, and its use is exploding in biomedical research and health care--including across all dimensions of cancer research, where the potential applications for AI are vast. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer performing tasks commonly associated with human intelligence. Humans are coding or programing a computer to act, reason, and learn. An algorithm or model is the code that tells the computer how to act, reason, and learn.

After outcry from consumers and privacy advocates, Google announced Monday that it is making changes to its practice of transcribing audio from Google Assistant devices. According to the search giant, it is asking Google Home users to re-affirm their participation in the service's Voice & Audio Activity setting. But Google says it's also making it more clear that participating entails the possibility of other people listening to audio clips of Google Assistant interactions. Alongside other tech companies, Google is responding to increased backlash against its data sharing and privacy practices. Google's change in policy is just the latest example of how customers' concerns are being taken more seriously in light of the growing tension.

Kartik Hosanagar was ready to turn his home into one of the future. He was looking forward to connecting his thermostat, television, light bulbs and other Internet-enabled smart devices and control all of them with a phone, tablet or just his voice. Hosanagar, a technology and digital business professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, had everything hooked up and the new arrangement went fine for several months -- until one day his television started turning itself on and off. It turned out that a friend who had helped Hosanagar set up his smart home still had access to his home and was inadvertently controlling his TV from his home. "Sometime during the setup, we switched to his phone and used the TV app to set it up," Hosanagar said.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Sept. 23 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Amazon is planning to announce Alexa-powered wireless earbuds at its product launch on Wednesday, a new report claims. The rumored earbuds are codenamed "Puget" and are designed to make it easier to use Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, on the go, while also working as a health and fitness device that can monitor a range of metrics, a source told CNBC. The source claimed Amazon is trying to undercut Apple's AirPods, which have become ubiquitous, and Samsung's Galaxy Buds, by pricing its wireless earbuds under $100.

Voice-controlled personal and home assistants (such as the Amazon Echo and Apple Siri) are becoming increasingly popular for a variety of applications. However, the benefits of these technologies are not readily accessible to Deaf or Hard-ofHearing (DHH) users. The objective of this study is to develop and evaluate a sign recognition system using multiple modalities that can be used by DHH signers to interact with voice-controlled devices. With the advancement of depth sensors, skeletal data is used for applications like video analysis and activity recognition. Despite having similarity with the well-studied human activity recognition, the use of 3D skeleton data in sign language recognition is rare. This is because unlike activity recognition, sign language is mostly dependent on hand shape pattern. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of using skeletal and RGB video data for sign language recognition using a combination of different deep learning architectures. We validate our results on a large-scale American Sign Language (ASL) dataset of 12 users and 13107 samples across 51 signs. It is named as GMUASL51. We collected the dataset over 6 months and it will be publicly released in the hope of spurring further machine learning research towards providing improved accessibility for digital assistants.

Automation is affecting every aspect of modern living and TV is no different. Jonathan Easton examines the role that AI is playing in the user experience and how'the algorithm' has quietly revolutionised the way we view content. Every few years, a new fad takes the industry by storm. In the early part of this decade it was 3D, and after that it was virtual reality, augmented reality and everything in between. But artificial intelligence (AI) is no such fad.

Recently, a study indicated UK workers fearing artificial intelligence to eliminate their jobs. Is AI going to steal away our jobs or is it all a hype? We're undergoing a technology revolution experiencing breathless stories about how artificial intelligence is going to replace our jobs. Are these signs of artificial intelligence apocalypse? Is there anything at all that reveals the AI phenomenon or is it just an image of a boogeyman trying to scare us into line?

It's becoming possible to think of robots through the male and female lenses we view humans. Naturally, with the presence of voice-based AI, it's only inevitable that we begin categorizing AI in these lenses, to facilitate the usage of pronouns in reference to them and bond them even further with humanity. Siri and other forms of smartphone assistants can be altered to speak in either a male or female's voice, depending on the preferences of the user. To make the alteration more realistic, their dialogue will also change depending on the voice used, almost monumentally. And unfortunately, this only leads to gender bias in the forms of arbitrary treatment towards progressing sexist stereotypes.