Online dating giants are set to offer digital health passports to millions of UK singletons to prove they are free of coronavirus. Manchester-based cyber firm VST Enterprises (VSTE), is pioneering technology which it says can be used to safeguard daters when coronavirus restrictions are eased. The company says it has been approached for its digital health passports by several leading dating app companies. Tinder and Grindr are believed to be two of the dating apps that are waiting to launch them. The technology, called'VCode', would enable a doctor or nurse to upload the results of a government-approved Covid-19 test to the digital health passport.

If you can't meet a date in person, then where they live doesn't really matter. That's what Tinder seems to think, anyway. The company is reportedly planning to test a new Global Mode, which will allow profiles to show up around the world, The Verge reports. Users will be able to match with people in other cities, states and even countries. Tinder says it will begin rolling out the "first steps" of Global Mode in late May but that it will take some time before it is available to all members. To start, Global Mode will be a free opt-in feature.

We propose a new task of conversational recommendation over multi-type dialogs, where the bots can proactively and naturally lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog (e.g., QA) to a recommendation dialog, taking into account user's interests and feedback. To facilitate the study of this task, we create a human-to-human Chinese dialog dataset \emph{DuRecDial} (about 10k dialogs, 156k utterances), which contains multiple sequential dialogs for every pair of a recommendation seeker (user) and a recommender (bot). In each dialog, the recommender proactively leads a multi-type dialog to approach recommendation targets and then makes multiple recommendations with rich interaction behavior. This dataset allows us to systematically investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how to interact with users for recommendation. Finally we establish baseline results on DuRecDial for future studies. Dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/models/tree/develop/PaddleNLP/Research/ACL2020-DuRecDial.

In this paper, we propose a novel optimization criterion that leverages features of the skew normal distribution to better model the problem of personalized recommendation. Specifically, the developed criterion borrows the concept and the flexibility of the skew normal distribution, based on which three hyperparameters are attached to the optimization criterion. Furthermore, from a theoretical point of view, we not only establish the relation between the maximization of the proposed criterion and the shape parameter in the skew normal distribution, but also provide the analogies and asymptotic analysis of the proposed criterion to maximization of the area under the ROC curve. Experimental results conducted on a range of large-scale real-world datasets show that our model significantly outperforms the state of the art and yields consistently best performance on all tested datasets.

Many decisions are made and details sorted out in a productive business meeting. But in order for that meeting to translate into results, participants have to remember all those details, understand their assignments, and follow through on commitments. The startup Fireflies.ai is helping people get the most out of their meetings with a note-taking, information-organizing virtual assistant named Fred. Fred transcribes every word of meetings and then uses artificial intelligence to help people sort and share that information later on. "There's a tremendous amount of data generated in meetings that can help your team stay on the same page," says Sam Udotong '16, who founded the company with Krish Ramineni in 2016.

You're not going to hear anything about Cortana this week at Microsoft's Build conference. Microsoft Cortana has moved from becoming the flagship feature at the Windows 10 launch to something of a has-been. And yet the intelligence that powers her is something that's become a priority for Microsoft, creating the impression that there's Cortana, and then there's AI, and the two are separate and distinct. There's a similar gap between the reason that Cortana is absent from Build, and separate underlying issues with Cortana itself. Put simply, it's a bit of a mess.

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.