Customers trying to delete their Uber account in light of former employee Susan Fowler's sexual harassment allegations have started receiving a notification referencing the incident. The taxi-hailing app company is launching an "urgent investigation" into the workplace issues raised by Ms Fowler, and has hired former US President Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder to lead it. The claims have prompted the latest in a series of backlashes against Uber, with customers urging users to delete their accounts. "Everyone at Uber is deeply hurting after reading Susan Fowler's blog post," reads a message seen by Mashable, which is being sent to users in the process of cutting their ties with Uber. "What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in."

As many as three quarters of Irish companies believe artificial intelligence (AI) will have a major impact on their industry in the coming years, with 25 per cent expecting it to completely transform their sector. That's according to Accenture's annual Technology Vision 2017 report, which reports on the most disruptive tech trends for businesses. The survey of more than 5,400 business and IT executives across 16 industries and 31 countries, including Ireland, indicates that AI is moving far beyond being a back-end tool to take on a more sophisticated role within companies. Irish companies are seen to be particularly aware of the changing role for AI with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying they believe it will revolutionise the way they gain information from and interact with customers. Almost three quarters of those surveyed also expect AI interfaces to become their primary interface for interacting with the outside world.

I heard a lot of horror stories about SEO not working lately among businesses. Some say search engine optimization has no future. Some others lately added affiliate marketing to the list. Let me set the record straight,once and for all, search engine optimization SEO is one of digital marketing processes. As long as Internet exists, seo will continue to be a part of online marketing.

Autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars are coming. Experts predict that every major auto manufacturer will have a self-driving car on the market by the early 2020s. And this has got many people talking about the business impacts. Every revolutionary technology brings with it revolutionary change. Businesses and industries that don't adjust quickly could face catastrophic consequences.

Machine learning- to put it mildly- is an incredibly broad and varied field, with multitudes of applications. Thus, writing a list entitled "10 Machine Learning Experts You Need to Know" proves challenging for a number of reasons. Firstly, I've restricted my ten picks to those currently working in the field- if I extended it to those living and passed, I never would have been able to identify only ten worthy of mention. Secondly, this list is in no way ranked- how would I decide which is more remarkable? Third, this is by no means an exhaustive list of people currently making significant contributions to the field of machine learning, or the wider world.

The whole question of our ability to understand and control the algorithms we're producing has come about precisely because we need to develop models capable of adapting to the correct processing of the data they receive. The validity of the suggestions they come up with has to be checked, and if needs be, invalidated by the human user to avoid any risk of uncontrolled automation. The whole conversation though has now been started as a way of accessing, sharing and developing knowledge. So it seems logical that the first means of interaction with an Artificial Intelligence form and hastening its learning has to be language, whether it's spoken or written. The embedding of specialized software in the form of speech robots for instant messaging looks set to be a promising area.

OUT of the way, human, I've got this covered. A machine learning system has gained the ability to write its own code. Created by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Cambridge, the system, called DeepCoder, solved basic challenges of the kind set by programming competitions. This kind of approach could make it much easier for people to build simple programs without knowing how to write code. "All of a sudden people could be so much more productive," says Armando Solar-Lezama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work.

MEMPHIS -- Amid the confusion and pandemonium that would follow a major earthquake, Memphis-area emergency-response officials plan to deploy drones to check for collapsed buildings and bridges, locate fires and guide rescue crews. Toward that end, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, a Memphis-based agency charged with helping prepare an eight-state region for temblors on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, has begun developing a network of licensed drone pilots to aid in quake-response efforts. This week, CUSEC will convene an initial meeting of prospective participants. "We're going to use their insights into determining how to build this (network)," said Jim Wilkinson, executive director of CUSEC. The use of drones following disasters is not new.

In the right architecture, machine-learning functionality takes data analytics to the next level of value. Editor's note: This guest post (translated from Italian and originally published in late 2016) by Lorenzo Ridi, of Google Cloud Platform partner Noovle of Italy, describes a POC for building an end-to-end analytic pipeline on GCP that includes machine-learning functionality. "Black Friday" is traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States. Black Friday can be a great opportunity to promote products, raise brand awareness and kick-off the holiday shopping season with a bang. During that period, whatever the type of retail involved, it's also becoming increasingly important to monitor and respond to consumer sentiment and feedback across social media channels.

Siri on the iPhone, Cortana on Windows, Alexa, self-driving cars, and face recognition on Facebook photos, these are all examples of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a profound impact on human lives. This trend is also impacting manufacturing, albeit on a smaller scale now, with robots being increasingly used to replace humans in factories across the globe, from the US, Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Foxconn has already replaced 60,000 humans with robots in its factories, after developing artificial intelligence solutions for its manufacturing processes. Such a strategy they insist shall help them offset increasing labour costs in labour-intensive countries such as China. Also, with AI technologies finding their way into manufacturing, leading economists from MIT are worried that technology is replacing jobs at a faster pace than creating new ones, which could lead to higher unemployment over a short-term period.