Looking Back at the Top Virtual Assistants of 2020

A virtual assistant is simply an assistant who works remotely. As technological advancements in the 1990s brought reliable internet to more homes, businesses realized they did not have to bring an employee into the office to get work done, and this led to the first virtual assistant.

Virtual assistants are in demand because of entrepreneurs and online businesses. They need help but don’t want to spend resources on office space for staff. However, many small and mid-size businesses use virtual support, especially for specific tasks like social media management.

Theoretically, a virtual assistant can do anything that a human staff might do. There are limitations, but technology is increasingly offering ways to work around those limitations. For instance, although they may not be able to bring you coffee physically in the morning, they can place a coffee or lunch order through a food delivery service.

Virtual support duties are not limited to clerical work. They may provide assistance with marketing, web design, and many other services. Some virtual assistants specialise in a specific skill set, and they only perform duties associated with those skills.

Virtual assistants may also work as employees for a company. Other virtual assistants will jump from company to company with short-term contracts found through freelance sites. Let’s see the best virtual assistants of 2020 before the year ends.

#chatbots #latest news #virtual assistants #2020

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Citrix Bugs Allow Unauthenticated Code Injection, Data Theft

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway would allow code injection, information disclosure and denial of service, the networking vendor announced Tuesday. Four of the bugs are exploitable by an unauthenticated, remote attacker.

The Citrix products (formerly known as NetScaler ADC and Gateway) are used for application-aware traffic management and secure remote access, respectively, and are installed in at least 80,000 companies in 158 countries, according to a December assessment from Positive Technologies.

Other flaws announced Tuesday also affect Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliances, models 4000-WO, 4100-WO, 5000-WO and 5100-WO.

Attacks on the management interface of the products could result in system compromise by an unauthenticated user on the management network; or system compromise through cross-site scripting (XSS). Attackers could also create a download link for the device which, if downloaded and then executed by an unauthenticated user on the management network, could result in the compromise of a local computer.

“Customers who have configured their systems in accordance with Citrix recommendations [i.e., to have this interface separated from the network and protected by a firewall] have significantly reduced their risk from attacks to the management interface,” according to the vendor.

Threat actors could also mount attacks on Virtual IPs (VIPs). VIPs, among other things, are used to provide users with a unique IP address for communicating with network resources for applications that do not allow multiple connections or users from the same IP address.

The VIP attacks include denial of service against either the Gateway or Authentication virtual servers by an unauthenticated user; or remote port scanning of the internal network by an authenticated Citrix Gateway user.

“Attackers can only discern whether a TLS connection is possible with the port and cannot communicate further with the end devices,” according to the critical Citrix advisory. “Customers who have not enabled either the Gateway or Authentication virtual servers are not at risk from attacks that are applicable to those servers. Other virtual servers e.g. load balancing and content switching virtual servers are not affected by these issues.”

A final vulnerability has been found in Citrix Gateway Plug-in for Linux that would allow a local logged-on user of a Linux system with that plug-in installed to elevate their privileges to an administrator account on that computer, the company said.

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Chatbot vs Virtual Assistants: The 4 Key Differences

Conversational AI has seen an exponential rise in popularity in the last decade and has become mainstream over the past two years. Enterprise adoption of Conversational AI is accelerating. Businesses are investing millions of dollars for conversational AI applications with massive expectations to improve customer experience and operational efficiencies.

Gartner_ says – “By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.”_

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are leveraging AI technologies to provide innovative and efficient solutions benefiting customers, employees, and partners. In this scenario, it is crucial to understand the fundamental differences between a Chatbot and a more sophisticated solution like a Virtual assistant.

Businesses and professionals who are planning or implementing a conversational AI solution should know this difference to reap benefits from these technologies. Without such proper understanding, there will be a high chance of failure to meet the expectations.

#chatbots-vs-virtual-assistants #chatbots #virtual-assistant #intellugent-virtual-assistant #chatbot-and-virtual-assistant #ai-chatbot #chatbot-development #use-cases-of-chatbots

Looking Back at the Top Virtual Assistants of 2020

A virtual assistant is simply an assistant who works remotely. As technological advancements in the 1990s brought reliable internet to more homes, businesses realized they did not have to bring an employee into the office to get work done, and this led to the first virtual assistant.

Virtual assistants are in demand because of entrepreneurs and online businesses. They need help but don’t want to spend resources on office space for staff. However, many small and mid-size businesses use virtual support, especially for specific tasks like social media management.

Theoretically, a virtual assistant can do anything that a human staff might do. There are limitations, but technology is increasingly offering ways to work around those limitations. For instance, although they may not be able to bring you coffee physically in the morning, they can place a coffee or lunch order through a food delivery service.

Virtual support duties are not limited to clerical work. They may provide assistance with marketing, web design, and many other services. Some virtual assistants specialise in a specific skill set, and they only perform duties associated with those skills.

Virtual assistants may also work as employees for a company. Other virtual assistants will jump from company to company with short-term contracts found through freelance sites. Let’s see the best virtual assistants of 2020 before the year ends.

#chatbots #latest news #virtual assistants #2020

Top 10 Deep Learning Sessions To Look Forward To At DVDC 2020

The Deep Learning DevCon 2020, DLDC 2020, has exciting talks and sessions around the latest developments in the field of deep learning, that will not only be interesting for professionals of this field but also for the enthusiasts who are willing to make a career in the field of deep learning. The two-day conference scheduled for 29th and 30th October will host paper presentations, tech talks, workshops that will uncover some interesting developments as well as the latest research and advancement of this area. Further to this, with deep learning gaining massive traction, this conference will highlight some fascinating use cases across the world.

Here are ten interesting talks and sessions of DLDC 2020 that one should definitely attend:

Also Read: Why Deep Learning DevCon Comes At The Right Time

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Adversarial Robustness in Deep Learning

By Dipanjan Sarkar

**About: **Adversarial Robustness in Deep Learning is a session presented by Dipanjan Sarkar, a Data Science Lead at Applied Materials, as well as a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. In this session, he will focus on the adversarial robustness in the field of deep learning, where he talks about its importance, different types of adversarial attacks, and will showcase some ways to train the neural networks with adversarial realisation. Considering abstract deep learning has brought us tremendous achievements in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this talk will be really interesting for people working in this area. With this session, the attendees will have a comprehensive understanding of adversarial perturbations in the field of deep learning and ways to deal with them with common recipes.

Read an interview with Dipanjan Sarkar.

Imbalance Handling with Combination of Deep Variational Autoencoder and NEATER

By Divye Singh

**About: **Imbalance Handling with Combination of Deep Variational Autoencoder and NEATER is a paper presentation by Divye Singh, who has a masters in technology degree in Mathematical Modeling and Simulation and has the interest to research in the field of artificial intelligence, learning-based systems, machine learning, etc. In this paper presentation, he will talk about the common problem of class imbalance in medical diagnosis and anomaly detection, and how the problem can be solved with a deep learning framework. The talk focuses on the paper, where he has proposed a synergistic over-sampling method generating informative synthetic minority class data by filtering the noise from the over-sampled examples. Further, he will also showcase the experimental results on several real-life imbalanced datasets to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method for binary classification problems.

Default Rate Prediction Models for Self-Employment in Korea using Ridge, Random Forest & Deep Neural Network

By Dongsuk Hong

About: This is a paper presentation given by Dongsuk Hong, who is a PhD in Computer Science, and works in the big data centre of Korea Credit Information Services. This talk will introduce the attendees with machine learning and deep learning models for predicting self-employment default rates using credit information. He will talk about the study, where the DNN model is implemented for two purposes — a sub-model for the selection of credit information variables; and works for cascading to the final model that predicts default rates. Hong’s main research area is data analysis of credit information, where she is particularly interested in evaluating the performance of prediction models based on machine learning and deep learning. This talk will be interesting for the deep learning practitioners who are willing to make a career in this field.

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Property Management Virtual Assistant — Why do you need them?

If your company is growing too quickly for you to handle your own, a virtual assistant is your best savior. Here are a few of the reasons why you must hire a virtual assistant for property management services.

#real estate virtual assistant, #property management virtual assistant #virtual assistant services