AI and attempts to model human behavior

Originally posted on The Horizons Tracker. I've written a few times recently about the initial forays of IBM's Watson into retail. For instance, at the back end of last year they launched Watson Trend to help us buy the perfect holiday gift, whilst they've also powered the recommendation engine at retailers such as North Face. Both are good examples of the use of AI to help provide more accurate predictions of the things we prefer. A good example of the work being undertaken in this area comes from a recently published paper that sees researchers develop a filtering model to do this job.