Dallas Police Chief David Brown answers questions during a news conference, Monday, July 11, 2016, in Dallas. Five police officers were killed and several injured during a shooting in downtown Dallas last week. Dallas Police Chief David Brown answers questions during a news conference, Monday, July 11, 2016, in Dallas. Five police officers were killed and several injured during a shooting in downtown Dallas last week. An FBI evidence response team works the crime scene, Sunday, July 10, 2016, where five Dallas police officers were killed Thursday, in Dallas.

How often do you ring your bank and forget the special dates, places or names needed just to get through security? Apparently, it takes us 45 seconds on average just to confirm who we are. Now that might not seem very long, but if you're a global bank like Citi receiving 35 million calls a year in Asia alone, that adds up to 437,500 hours of staff time a year. But by using computers to identify our voices, this authentication process can be cut to 15 seconds on average, saving the bank pots of cash and us lots of hassle. Citi has just begun rolling out this kind of voice biometrics authentication for its 15 million Asian banking customers, starting in Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The Walt Disney Co. is kicking off the third session of its corporate accelerator this week, and revealed 9 new companies admitted to the program. A full list follows at the end of this post. The companies are developing everything from cinematic virtual reality and holographic content, to robots with human-like facial expressions. Because alumni of the Disney Accelerator have scored big partnerships with the media and entertainment juggernaut in the past, it is seen as one of the more desirable corporate accelerators out there. According to research by Future Asia Ventures, there are 131 active corporate accelerators worldwide today, with 13 new programs launching in the first half of 2016.

The well known maximum-entropy principle due to Jaynes, which states that given mean parameters, the maximum entropy distribution matching them is in an exponential family, has been very popular in machine learning due to its "Occam's razor" interpretation. Unfortunately, calculating the potentials in the maximum-entropy distribution is intractable \cite{bresler2014hardness}. We provide computationally efficient versions of this principle when the mean parameters are pairwise moments: we design distributions that approximately match given pairwise moments, while having entropy which is comparable to the maximum entropy distribution matching those moments. We additionally provide surprising applications of the approximate maximum entropy principle to designing provable variational methods for partition function calculations for Ising models without any assumptions on the potentials of the model. More precisely, we show that in every temperature, we can get approximation guarantees for the log-partition function comparable to those in the low-temperature limit, which is the setting of optimization of quadratic forms over the hypercube. \cite{alon2006approximating}

Dallas Police Chief David Brown answers questions during a news conference, Monday, July 11, 2016, in Dallas. Five police officers were killed and several injured during a shooting in downtown Dallas last week. Dallas Police Chief David Brown answers questions during a news conference, Monday, July 11, 2016, in Dallas. Five police officers were killed and several injured during a shooting in downtown Dallas last week. An FBI evidence response team works the crime scene, Sunday, July 10, 2016, where five Dallas police officers were killed Thursday, in Dallas.

The Walt Disney Co. is kicking off the third session of its corporate accelerator this week, and revealed 9 new companies admitted to the program. A full list follows at the end of this post. The companies are developing everything from cinematic virtual reality and holographic content, to robots with human-like facial expressions. Because alumni of the Disney Accelerator have scored big partnerships with the media and entertainment juggernaut in the past, it is seen as one of the more desirable corporate accelerators out there. According to research by Future Asia Ventures, there are 131 active corporate accelerators worldwide today, with 13 new programs launching in the first half of 2016.

Priyadharshini writes on Project Management, IT, Six Sigma, & e-Learning. With a penchant for writing and a passion for professional education & development, she is adept at penning educative articles. She was previously associated with Oxford University Press and Pearson Education, India.

Today eBay announced it will acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. SalesPredict is eBay's latest acquisition that will support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. It follows eBay's recent acquisition of Expertmaker, in order to further bolster our structured data efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, a number of SalesPredict's employees will join eBay's structured data organization, working from eBay's Israeli Development Center in Netanya.

Intelligence, defined as the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Intelligence for the longest time possible is associated with the human brain. Artificial intelligence is basically defined as intelligence that is originating from machines. Most computer applications only make existing processes and functions faster and maybe more efficiently but cannot create new duties altogether. However, artificial intelligence has already challenged this notion.

In the first decades of the 20th century, people around the world began succumbing to an entirely new cause of mortality. These new deaths, due to the dangers of the automobile, soon became accepted as a lamentable but normal part of modern life. A hundred years later, with 1.25 million people worldwide (about 30,000 in the U.S.) being killed every year in road crashes, there's now an effort to reject the perception that these deaths are normal or acceptable. As reported in a recent New York Times article, a growing number of safety advocates, government officials, and journalists are moving away from the phrase "car accident" on the grounds that it presumes that the drivers involved are blameless--a presumption that is correct only 6 percent of the time, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The vast majority of such incidents are caused by drivers who make mistakes, take risks, or drive while distracted or impaired.