The novel Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is composed of a growing number of heterogeneous smart objects and services that are transforming architectures and applications, increasing systems' complexity, and the need for reliability and autonomy. In this context, both smart objects and services are often provided by third parties which do not give full transparency regarding the security and privacy of the features offered. Although machine-based Service Level Agreements (SLA) have been recently leveraged to establish and share policies in Cloud-based scenarios, and also in the IoT context, the issue of making end users aware of the overall system security levels and the fulfillment of their privacy requirements through the provision of the requested service remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we propose a complete framework that defines suitable levels of privacy and security requirements in the acquisition of services in IoT, according to the user needs. Through the use of a Reinforcement Learning based solution, a user agent, inside the environment, is trained to choose the best smart objects granting access to the target services. Moreover, the solution is designed to guarantee deadline requirements and user security and privacy needs. Finally, to evaluate the correctness and the performance of the proposed approach we illustrate an extensive experimental analysis.

I agree with critics of the letter who say that worrying about future risks distracts us from the very real harms AI is already causing today. Biased systems are used to make decisions about people's lives that trap them in poverty or lead to wrongful arrests. Human content moderators have to sift through mountains of traumatizing AI-generated content for only $2 a day. Language AI models use so much computing power that they remain huge polluters. But the systems that are being rushed out today are going to cause a different kind of havoc altogether in the very near future.

Are the current credit underwriting policies not inclusive? They may not be, as these policies are drafted by human beings, like you and me, who are inherently biased and therefore prone to making rules that may discriminate against certain individuals or communities without the intention to do so. To address this issue effectively, the federal law in the US makes it illegal for a lender to deny credit or offer different terms based on protected traits like race, color, or religion. But do we have the same rules in India? As of today, we, unfortunately, don't have any such specific regulations in place.

Beyond asking for the latest temperature, calendar appointments and recipes, Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hub devices can be used for phone calls. Amazon announced on Wednesday a new alliance with wireless carrier AT&T to enable AT&T customers (on "eligible rate plans") to link their mobile numbers and turn their speaker into a two-way phone. This will enable them to make calls and answer their phone from contacts at home by saying "Alexa answer" without having to search for the phone, or answer on a dead battery. You can also have a choice of where you want to answer, via the phone, on your device, or Echo speaker. The alliance is exclusive with AT&T.

Bugs in Apple's iOS have cast serious doubt on the company's new parental controls. CNBC reports that restrictions that were designed to prevent kids from talking to strangers have been falling well short of their intended goal. Communications Limits, a parental control rolled out this week via iOS 13.1.3, Theoretically, this would prevent a child from communicating with anyone that wasn't already uploaded into the phones' contact list. However, a test from CNBC revealed that if an unknown number texted the device first, users were able to directly add that number to the address book and effectively subvert the parental lock.

Grapheme-based acoustic modeling has recently been shown to outperform phoneme-based approaches in both hybrid and end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), even on non-phonemic languages like English. However, graphemic ASR still has problems with rare long-tail words that do not follow the standard spelling conventions seen in training, such as entity names. In this work, we present a novel method to train a statistical grapheme-to-grapheme (G2G) model on text-to-speech data that can rewrite an arbitrary character sequence into more phonetically consistent forms. We show that using G2G to provide alternative pronunciations during decoding reduces Word Error Rate by 3% to 11% relative over a strong graphemic baseline and bridges the gap on rare name recognition with an equivalent phonetic setup. Unlike many previously proposed methods, our method does not require any change to the acoustic model training procedure. This work reaffirms the efficacy of grapheme-based modeling and shows that specialized linguistic knowledge, when available, can be leveraged to improve graphemic ASR.

A final beta version of Apple's iOS 13 was found sporting some pretty major flaws just a week before the operating system is set to be released on devices everywhere. As reported by The Verge, researcher Jose Rodriguez discovered a flaw that enables one to access a phone's list of contacts by initiating a FaceTime call. Once a call is placed, Rodriguez shows how, using the voice-over accessibility feature through the iPhones virtual assistant, Siri, all of the contacts in the phone can be accessed, revealing email addresses, phone numbers, names, and any other information stored in the phone's contact list. The flaw, which Rodriguez reported to Apple in July after examining public betas of iOS 13, is similar to one found by the researcher in the operating system's predecessor, iOS 12.1. Though iOS 13 has yet to be released, betas of the new operating system have been available for months, meaning anyone who downloaded the preliminary versions has been unknowingly walking around with the glitch in their device.

If you ordered an Echo Show on Amazon Prime Day, you aren't alone. The smart device is one of the top-selling products from Amazon's biggest shopping event of the year. Check out the 15 deals everyone bought on Prime Day.) If you're the proud new owner of an Echo Show, you may be wondering how to set it up and exactly what it can do. Make sure to download the Alexa App on your smartphone or tablet so you're able to install skills and games on your Echo Show.

If you have an Amazon Echo in your home you already know how useful it can be. Whether you want to play music, turn on your lights, or just check the weather, Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers can pretty much do it all. And that includes making calls. That's right, you can use your Echo devices to call people in your contacts, even if they don't have an Echo device of their own. Here's how it all works: The first thing you need to do is give Alexa access to your contacts.

Ironically, the couple had joked that their Amazon Alexa could be listening in to their private conversations. This shortly became a reality when it was found that a conversation the couple had in their own home was recorded by Alexa. This came to light when Amazon's artificial intelligence sent the recording to someone on the couple's contact list, seemingly at random. The recipient was one of the employees of the husband, based in Seattle (some 176 miles away from the couple's home). After warning the couple, the recipient then decided to alert the media.