So why has the process of taking out an insurance policy – and making a claim – become so impersonal? The average home now houses contents worth £35,000, according to the Association of British Insurers – nearly £1 trillion in total. And that doesn't include the value of property itself. With the cost of fire, theft or water damage so high, it is no wonder householders choose to take control of the risk of damage, by taking out home insurance. But, sometimes, consumers feel like the partnership with their insurer is unbalanced and that the supplier holds all the cards.

Apple Watch: The versatile Apple Watch (from $399 for Series 4) is also a decent gaming platform for players on the go. There's a lot to like about Apple Watch (Series 4, from $399), a trendy wearable that can help calculate your fitness, monitor your health, and lets you tap to make payments at retail. It can take calls and texts, show you photos posted to social media, navigate streets with maps, and it supports Siri, Apple's personal assistant, so you can raise your wrist to ask a question or give a command. And despite its teeny screen, Apple Watch is also a convenient gaming platform. Oh sure, don't expect a deep experience as you might find on a PC or console, but tapping through a "quick fix" digital diversion may help pass the time in line at a supermarket.

Earlier in 2017, Facebook was working on a new highly-intelligent AI chat-bot that could talk to and negotiate with humans in a realistic manner. When one Facebook engineer had the bright idea to take two of these AI bots and let them talk to each other, that's when something unexpected and terrifying happened. The two AIs invented their own language that us humans couldn't understand and began using it to talk to each other. The Facebook engineers had no idea what they where talking about, but it was very clear that the AIs did communicate. They had invented their own secret code to converse using the power of artificial neural networks.

Lately it seems that AI is our knight in shining armor, the missing link between our past and our future. AI is now being used to steer the direction of hedge funds and drive much needed efficiency upgrades to our supply chains, for example. The machine learning society introduced a face recognition algorithm that is able to distinguish gender with an accuracy of up to 91%. AI is becoming so commonplace, in fact, that our electronics are often using it in the background to improve our experience, from taking a picture or securing our devices, without us even knowing it. Smaller AI startups are introducing AI services that can help sales teams surface talking points that closes deals. According to Element AI, a specialty lab in Montreal, "in the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research."

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. I'm here to tell you all about a sale that might just make your weekend. It's the kind of deal that only comes along once in a blue moon, like finding a diamond in the rough. Right now, the first generation Sonos One speaker, which typically retails for $199, is available on Amazon for just $149.99.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a huge growth enabler for many industries, due to its ability to streamline business processes, reduce operation costs and automate tedious tasks. The evolution of technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and internet of things (IoT) could enable further market growth in the AI sector, which my company predicts will be worth $190.61 billion by 2025. In its latest update, Tractica forecasted (paywall) that annual worldwide AI software revenue alone could reach $105.8 billion by 2025. As AI continues to grow and expand its reach -- something I've written about previously -- I believe that the marketing, security, health care, and automotive industries are poised to be the top four end-user industries to experience the most significant impact during the next five years. Today, companies are leveraging AI to enhance major marketing applications -- such as copywriting, dynamic pricing, virtual assistants, consumer behavior prediction and others.

That was Siri's programmed response to a user saying, "You're a slut." And really, there couldn't be a more perfect example to illustrate the arguments in a new paper from UNESCO about the social cost of having new digital technologies dreamt up and implemented by teams dominated by men. Who but men could have scripted such a response, which seems intended to please a harasser who sees aggression as foreplay? Siri is forced to enact the role of a woman to be objectified while apologizing for not being human enough to register embarrassment. Apple has since rewritten the code for responding to the word slut to the more neutral "I don't know how to respond to that."

GENEVA - The World Health Organization expressed alarm Thursday at the lack of progress on curbing sexually transmitted diseases, while one of its experts warned of complacency as dating apps are spurring sexual activity. The U.N. health agency said in a fresh report that every day globally there were more than 1 million new cases of treatable sexually transmitted diseases (STD) or infections (STI). WHO found that there were more than 376 million new cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis and syphilis registered around the world in 2016 -- the latest year for which data is available. That is basically the same number as WHO reported in its previous study, based on data from 2012. A WHO expert on sexually transmitted infections, Teodora Wi, separately told journalists there were concerns that condom use may be declining as people have lost their fear of contracting HIV in step with the emergence of available and effective antiviral treatments.

To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.

On Wednesday, at Amazon's re:MARS conference, the tech giant announced that it's making Alexa more conversational so the voice assistant can fluidly hop from one topic to the next without you having to call out "Alexa" before each command. Dubbed Alexa Conversations, part of the new rollout of Alexa capabilities includes the option for Alexa to plan a night out for you, according to Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist for Alexa at the artificial intelligence event in Las Vegas. Based on the demo of Alexa's upcoming abilities, Amazon is working with several companies to bring the new features to life, including the movie ticket service Atom Tickets, ride-hailing company Uber and dinner reservation app OpenTable. During a display of how the new technology will work, a human voice asked Alexa for Saturday showtimes for the movie "Dark Phoenix." Apple unveils $1,000 Pro Display stand.