Amazon has launched a real-life shop where people can just pick things up and leave. Amazon Go, as it is calling the shop, uses a range of technologies to watch over people and see what they take from the shop. When they leave – which is done simply by walking back out the door – they'll be charged through their Amazon account for everything that they've picked up. To shop at the store, people just sign in at the door with their Amazon app, by pressing their phone against a sensor. That signs them in – and then everything else is done automatically.

Uber made two big announcements on Monday: It is acquiring Geometric Intelligence, a New York-based startup, and using that 15-person team to help launch a new artificial intelligence division within Uber, called Uber AI Labs. Uber AI Labs will focus on improving both ride-hailing software and the company's self-driving car software, according to a blog post by Uber's product chief Jeff Holden. Geometric Intelligence, a 2-year-old artificial intelligence startup, will move its 15-person staff from New York to Uber's San Francisco headquarters to help build the lab. "In spite of notable wins with machine learning in recent years, we are still very much in the early innings of machine intelligence," Holden wrote in the blog post. "The formation of Uber AI Labs, to be directed by Geometric's Founding CEO Gary Marcus, represents Uber's commitment to advancing the state of the art, driven by our vision that moving people and things in the physical world can be radically faster, safer and accessible to all."

Only 26 percent of computer professionals were women in 2013, according to a recent review by the American Association of University Women. That figure has dropped 9 percent since 1990. Some say the industry is masculine by design. Others claim computer culture is unwelcoming -- even hostile -- to women. So, while STEM fields like biology, chemistry, and engineering see an increase in diversity, computing does not.

For Katja Hofmann, Minecraft is not just a virtual world: it is a gym for artificial intelligences. Hofmann, 36, is the lead researcher on Microsoft Research Lab's Project Malmo, an open-source platform that makes it possible to test AIs inside the game's pixelated universe. "A question in artificial intelligence is how we get AIs to learn how to interact in a complex environment, to experiment in a wide range of settings," she says. Researchers using Project Malmo, which was made available to developers in July 2016 after a year of in-house testing at Microsoft's Cambridge-based lab, can create AI agents and set them loose in a modified version of Minecraft's free-to-roam 3D environment. There, through trial and error, the agents learn how to move, walk and dodge obstacles in a physically consistent world - something usually requiring expensive robots.

Russian MPs have asked the state communications oversight agency to take action against the FIFA 17 video game for violating the country's law against gay propaganda. Communist MPs sent a letter to the communications oversight and state consumer protection agencies complaining that the popular EA Sports football game, which is rated all ages, "invites users to support the English football premier league's Rainbow Laces action, a massive campaign in support of LGBT", Izvestia newspaper reported. Premier League backs LGBT rainbow laces campaign for weekend's matches According to the 2013 law, such propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations can cause "harm to children's health and development", the letter said. The UK-based LGBT rights group Stonewall began the Rainbow Laces campaign last month to combat homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in football, noting that 72% of fans had heard anti-LGBT remarks at games over the past five years. Premier League matches and social media platforms have featured materials from the campaign.

Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence, a two-year-old artificial intelligence startup that vows to surpass the deep learning systems under development at internet giants like Google and Facebook. But as this tiny AI lab slips into Uber's increasingly vast and ambitious operation, the startup is still tight-lipped on what its technology actually looks like. Founded by New York University psychologist Gary Marcus and University of Cambridge professor of information engineering Zoubin Ghahramani, Geometric Intelligence spans thirteen other researchers culled from across the academic world. Fourteen of the startup's fifteen employees will move to San Francisco, where Uber is based, serving as the central AI lab for the ride-hailing company. Ghahramani, the mathematician most responsible for the startup's core technology, will remain at Cambridge while spending half his time working for Uber.

Pitch@Palace 7.0 will take place on Tuesday 25th April, 2017. Applications for Pitch@Palace 7.0 are now open. Click below to submit your application. In the run up to Pitch@Palace Boot Camp, 3 Pitch@Palace On Tour events provide Entrepreneurs from across the United Kingdom with the opportunity to learn about the Pitch@Palace programme, connect to local stakeholders and receive mentoring to develop their businesses. The winners from each Pitch@Palace On Tour event are selected to attend Pitch@Palace Boot Camp.

By now, you've probably heard the big news: The Last of Us Part II is coming. Developer Naughty Dog took to the stage at the PlayStation Experience (PSX) event in Anaheim, California on Saturday, confirming a sequel for its critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic adventure. We will return to the harrowing lives of Ellie and Joel as they seek to survive a nightmarish pandemic – and to take some sort of revenge. Little else is known about the game, but it's the manner of that announcement, and what else happened that night, that tells us a lot about where PlayStation – and the industry at large – is going. PSX is unlike any other corporate event in the games industry – it is equal parts video game expo, marketing conference and fan convention.

Allstate Corporation, the second largest insurance company in United States, founded in 1931, recently launched a Machine Learning recruitment challenge in partnership with Kaggle. Allstate's objective was to predict the cost, and hence the severity, of claims. The competition organizers provide the competitors with more than 300,000 examples with masked and anonymous data consisting of more than 100 categorical and numerical attributes, thus being compliant with confidentiality constraints. The Spark/Scala script explained in this post obtains the training and test input datasets from local or Amazon's AWS S3 environment and trains a Random Forest model over it. The objective is to demonstrate the use of Spark 2.0 Machine Learning pipelines with Scala language, AWS S3 integration and some general good practices for building Machine Learning models. In order to keep this main objective, more sophisticated techniques (such as a thorough exploratory data analysis and feature engineering) are intentionally omitted. Since almost all personal computers nowadays have many Gigabytes of RAM (and it is in an accelerated growing) and powerful CPUs and GPUs, many real-world machine learning problems can be solved with a single computer and frameworks such as ScikitLearn, with no need of a distributed system.

Back in early 2015, Google's mysterious DeepMind unveiled an algorithm that could teach itself to play Atari games. Based on deep neural nets, the AI impressively mastered nostalgic favorites such as Space Invaders and Pong without needing any explicit programming -- it simply learned through millions of examples. But the algorithm had a weakness: memory. Without a memory module, it couldn't store away any information it had already mastered. When faced with problems requiring multi-step reasoning, the algorithm faltered.