The Amazon logo appears on the company's logistics center in Brieselang, Germany, west of Berlin. Amazon announced Thursday it plans to add 30,000 part-time positions in the U.S. over the next year, part of a massive hiring binge by the online retailing giant. The part-time hiring includes 5,000 jobs in Virtual Customer Service, which would allow employees to work as a customer service agent from home. The remaining 25,000 would be at Amazon warehouses. Any part-time employees who work 20 hours or more a week are also eligible for benefits.

It is a tide that never recedes. Day by day, year on year it grows. Estimates are currently at trillions of pieces and counting, with over 60% of the oceans being heavily contaminated with plastics. With each piece of plastic taking over 400 years to degrade, our oceans, all marine life, and even our own health and livelihoods are in real danger of drowning. We see evidence of the plastic tide on all our beaches and coastlines by ever growing amounts, with small plastic pieces increasing 2.5 fold in the last decade.

Most consumers don't really know what artificial intelligence (AI) does, and the basic misunderstanding has some fearful of the technology. In a survey of 6,000 customers in six countries, the findings from Pegasystems study released this week found that consumers are hesitant to embrace AI devices and services. Some 36% are comfortable to engage with businesses using AI even if it results in a better customer experience. About 72% said they have some sort of fear about AI, with 24% worried about robots taking over the world. Only 34% of survey respondents thought they had directly experienced AI, but when asked about the technologies in their lives, the survey found that 84% use at least one AI-powered service or device such as virtual home assistants, intelligent chatbots, or predictive product suggestions.

Last year, I asked a simple question: Can drone racing become as big as eSports? While we wait to find out, one of the leading race organizers -- the Drone Racing League -- is making all the right moves this year to make that answer yes. One of the keys to achieving that, the DRL hopes, is the introduction of the Racer3 drone, which will be the standard craft all pilots in the DRL race with. Unsurprisingly, it's more powerful and agile than its predecessor (the Racer2, obviously) and could be the shot in the arm the sport needs to go mainstream. The Racer3 should make races -- which air on ESPN starting June 20th -- even more thrilling, luring more fans (and, by association, lucre) to the game.

CIOs in the U.S. and Europe are increasing their IT budgets thanks to an uptick in optimism, said Morgan Stanley in a new report. IT budgets are expected to grow 4.5% this year, "a tick above the historical average," according to a survey 100 CIOs of large firms in the U.S. and Europe. The top spending priorities include cloud computing, security software, analytics tools, networking equipment and ERP and CRM applications, Morgan Stanley said in its report, "CIO Survey: 2017 IT Budgets Improve on US Strength." Most hardware categories, including servers, printers and desktops, ranked near the bottom of the budget priority list as spending shifts to the cloud. IBM, which has seen ongoing revenue declines, is still having particular success with A.I., Morgan Stanley found.

Send a smiley with a smile. A prototype earbud can detect facial expressions and convert them into smartphone controls, like answering a phone call when you wink or launching Wikipedia when you open your mouth. It could be used by people with impaired movement or as a hands-free tool for drivers. "We're not trying to replace current input methods, just complement them," says Denys Matthies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Rostock, Germany. You're not always able to take your phone out of your pocket or look down at the screen, but might still like to be able to pause your music or pick up a call, he says.

Lord Martin Rees says machines could take over from humans within a few centuries and go on to enjoy billions of years of supremacy. The Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge pointed out that we still don't understand the origins of life, but will likely learn more about it over the next ten to 20 years. However, he believes that that alien intelligence, if it does exist, could be electronic and nothing like humans. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

We are excited to announce our new RL Tuner algorithm, a method for enchancing the performance of an LSTM trained on data using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We create an RL reward function that teaches the model to follow certain rules, while still allowing it to retain information learned from data. We use RL Tuner to teach concepts of music theory to an LSTM trained to generate melodies. When I joined Magenta as an intern this summer, the team was hard at work on developing better ways to train Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to generate sequences of notes. As you may remember from previous posts, these models typically consist of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on monophonic melodies. This means that melodies are fed into the network one note at a time, and it is trained to predict the next note in the sequence.

The relationship may have faded long ago, but the intimate images you shared have not. If you're lucky, your ex deleted them. If you're not, the photos have sprouted up online. Victims of such non-consensual posts, often referred to as "revenge porn," now have some help in preventing their spread: On Wednesday, Facebook announced new artificial intelligence tools designed to keep such content, once flagged, off its site for good. "It's wrong, it's hurtful, and if you report it to us, we will now use AI and image recognition to prevent it from being shared across all of our platforms," Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's founder and chief executive, said in a Facebook post.

Cybersecurity is only going to become a bigger concern in the coming years. But the problem for many companies is the shortage of qualified cybersecurity specialists available for hire as well as the challenge of keeping pace in a realm where the bad guys always seem to be one step ahead. UK-based Darktrace thinks thats where AI can come in. The company's Enterprise Immune System technology is a machine learning-based solution that monitors device and user behavior over networks – learning what is considered normal behavior and flagging anything suspicious or unusual. The technology is even capable of taking action on its own to expel and shut out hackers and malware.