Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Personal Assistant Systems


CAARS: A Context-Aware Artist Recommender System for Twitter Users

AAAI Conferences

In this work, we introduce a context-aware hybrid artist recommender system (CAARS) that uses Twitter usersโ€™ tweet-time patterns as context and usersโ€™ bias about gender and types of musicians to recommend artists. Our model offers a novel approach to improve a personalized music recommender system (MRS) as it extracts implicit information from the usersโ€™ past tweet-behavior and combines that with related content. The proposed model performs significantly better than collaborative and hybrid recommender systems and encourages further exploration.


Intelligent Assistant for Exploring Data Visualizations

AAAI Conferences

Visualization, while an effective tool for identifying patterns and insights, requires expert knowledge due to challenges faced when translating user queries to visual encodings. Research has shown that using a natural language interface (NLI) is effective for these challenges because the user can simply talk to a computer capable of producing the graphs directly. In this paper, we discuss our intelligent assistant which processes speech and hand pointing gestures while also dealing with any number of visualizations on a large screen display. Evaluation of the system shows that it is capable of quickly producing visualizations. It also particularly effective at responding to less ambiguous queries, while in certain cases can handle ambiguous or complex queries.


Debiased Offline Evaluation of Active Learning in Recommender Systems

AAAI Conferences

Active Learning (AL) when applied to Recommender Systems (RSs) aims at proactively acquiring additional ratings data from the RS users in order to improve subsequent recommendation quality. AL strategies are typically evaluated offline first, but the classic AL offline evaluation methodology does not take into account the bias problem in RS offline evaluation. This problem affects the evaluation of an RS, as brought to light by recent literature. But, we argue, it also affects the evaluation of AL strategies as well. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a new AL offline evaluation methodology for RSs which mitigates the bias and thus facilitates a truer picture of the performances of the AL strategies under evaluation. We illustrate our proposed methodology on two datasets and with three simple and well-known AL strategies from the literature. Our experimental results differ from those reported previously in the literature, which shows the importance of our approach to AL evaluation.


How to make your Google/Nest smart speakers, displays, and cameras listen for suspicious sounds

PCWorld

Google just relaunched its Nest Aware home security plans, complete with a simplified pricing structure and a host of new features. Chief among them: the ability for Google smart displays and speakers to alert you if they hear something suspicious. Users who pony up $6 a month ($60 if paid annually) for the standard Nest Aware plan will be able to set their Google Home and Nest devices to detect the sound of breaking glass and smoke alarms. The subscription covers all the Nest devices in your home and includes 30 days of cloud storage for event recordings made by Nest security cameras ("events" are recordings triggered by motion or sound). A $12-per-month/$120-per-year plan gives you 60 days of event storage in the cloud, plus 10 days of 24/7 video recording.


Guardian Soulmates to close next month

BBC News

The Guardian is closing its online dating service Guardian Soulmates because it is "no longer viable". The service, which has about 35,000 free members and paid subscribers, will close at the end of June, it said. The "online dating landscape has changed dramatically" since it launched in 2004, it added - making it a "very little fish in a very big pool". The 15 years since its launch has seen the growth of global dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. Guardian Soulmates said on its website: "There are so many dating apps now, so many ways to meet people, which are often free and very quick.


Multi-modal Embedding Fusion-based Recommender

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different kinds, e.g. food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, telecom operators. Here, we present our system, its flexibility and performance. We also show benchmark results on open datasets, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art prior work.


Thompson Sampling for Combinatorial Semi-bandits with Sleeping Arms and Long-Term Fairness Constraints

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problem with long-term fairness constraints~(CSMAB-F). To address the problem, we adopt Thompson Sampling~(TS) to maximize the total rewards and use virtual queue techniques to handle the fairness constraints, and design an algorithm called \emph{TS with beta priors and Bernoulli likelihoods for CSMAB-F~(TSCSF-B)}. Further, we prove TSCSF-B can satisfy the fairness constraints, and the time-averaged regret is upper bounded by $\frac{N}{2\eta} + O\left(\frac{\sqrt{mNT\ln T}}{T}\right)$, where $N$ is the total number of arms, $m$ is the maximum number of arms that can be pulled simultaneously in each round~(the cardinality constraint) and $\eta$ is the parameter trading off fairness for rewards. By relaxing the fairness constraints (i.e., let $\eta \rightarrow \infty$), the bound boils down to the first problem-independent bound of TS algorithms for combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problems. Finally, we perform numerical experiments and use a high-rating movie recommendation application to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.


Is Artificial Intelligence The Future of Content Marketing?

#artificialintelligence

If you ask someone what comes to their mind after hearing the words'artificial intelligence', they would probably answer something like'robots, self-driving cars' etc. However, AI goes way beyond that. Furthermore, you have probably already encountered it in your life but didn't even know it. The perfect example is Siri. AI is more than just robots.


The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Edge Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

With the advancements in deep learning, the recent years have seen a humongous growth of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and services, traversing from personal assistant to recommendation systems to video/audio surveillance. All the more as of late, with the expansion of mobile computing and Internet of Things (IoT), billions of mobile and IoT gadgets are connected with the Internet, creating zillions of bytes of information at the network edge. Driven by this pattern, there is a pressing need to push the AI frontiers to the network edge in order to completely release the potential of the edge big data. To satisfy this need, edge computing, an emerging paradigm that pushes computing undertakings and services from the network core to the network edge, has been generally perceived as a promising arrangement. The resulting new interdiscipline, edge AI or edge intelligence (EI), is starting to get an enormous amount of interest. In any case, research on EI is still in its earliest stages, and a devoted scene for trading the ongoing advances of EI is exceptionally wanted by both the computer system and AI people group.


Enhancing Customer Experience and Satisfaction with Conversational AI

#artificialintelligence

Conversational AI refers to a form of technology that creates speech-based assistants and enables greater engagement and interaction with customers at scale across platforms. It has the potential to unlock concealed value within an organization at large. Leveraging Conversational AI allows businesses to reinvent and reignite the customer experience with enhanced engagement and personalized services, and deliver improved customer satisfaction. In the today's highly competitive business environment, many companies and websites utilize conversational AI solutions to serve effective, personalized services to their customers. With increasing customer expectations, it has become significant for businesses to available 24/7 with instant and personalized services in the appropriate language.