Amazon has release a flurry of new hardware and software updates that expand on its popular series of Echo smart speakers and transform Alexa into celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson. For the first time ever, Amazon announced that it is letting Echo users turn Alexa into celebrities for a'special price' of $0.99 for anyone that purchased a speaker in 2019. Samuel L. Jackson will be among the first celebrities voice integrations and will come in both explicit (presumably with lots of f-bombs) and clean versions. More celebrities are set to arrive on the device, though Amazon hasn't yet hinted at who those additions may be. The first-ever high-end smart speaker from Amazon will be called the Echo Studio and is being positioned as a companion to the company's HD streaming service The company also announced new additions to its Echo hardware, including its first-ever high-end smart speaker which it's calling the'Echo Studio.'

A programmer at an internet-search company, Caleb Smith, wins a competition to spend a week at the CEO's estate, tucked away in the mountains. But he learns that he was chosen to be the human half of a Turing Test, a method of determining if a computer is capable of thinking like a real person. Tasked with evaluating Ava, a beautiful cutting-edge robot, they soon find that she is capable of more than they could have conceived. Her - Oct. 14, 7 p.m. Set in a near future in sunny Los Angeles, 2013's Her -- Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay -- follows Theodore Twombly, a recently-divorced man who writes personal letters for other people for a living. Lonely and mourning his relationship, he begins using an advanced operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) -- think Amazon's Alexa or Google Home -- to which he forms a strong bond.

Yesterday, we talked about how Facebook has decided to monitor political speech. Today, we want to tell you about an area where Facebook is boldly going forward - dating. Facebook recently launched this new feature in the U.S. after testing it overseas. We wanted to know how people should feel about trusting Facebook in this particularly sensitive area since the company has long been under scrutiny for the way it handles users' data, so we've called Lisa Bonos. She writes about dating and relationships for the Washington Post.

This article presents the emerging topic of dynamic search (DS). To position dynamic search in a larger research landscape, the article discusses in detail its relationship to related research topics and disciplines. The article reviews approaches to modeling dynamics during information seeking, with an emphasis on Reinforcement Learning (RL)-enabled methods. Details are given for how different approaches are used to model interactions among the human user, the search system, and the environment. The paper ends with a review of evaluations of dynamic search systems.

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.