As creepy clowns dominate the headlines and my email inbox fills up with pumpkins and ghouls it can only mean one thing -- this is Halloween. It seems like every retailer out there is trying to jump on the Halloween ghost train, and it's no wonder, with the NRF annual survey predicting spend in 2016 will hit $8.4bn, the highest in the survey's history. Even in the UK, where Halloween has always played second fiddle to the more traditional Bonfire Night, Halloween is the new holiday to back for retailers, now the second biggest party night after New Years Eve (Guardian, October 2015).

The nascent additive construction industry is slowly starting to take shape as an increasing number of start-ups appear on the scene with techniques for 3D printing large-scale structures. The latest is a London-based company called Ai Build, which aims to make additive construction smarter and more accessible through the use of artificial intelligence and affordable materials. As with many additive construction endeavors, Ai Build's entry into the field begins with a 3D-printed pavilion. As an ornamental building, a pavilion is the perfect large, yet nonfunctional structure for demonstrating the possibilities of 3D-printed architecture, as there is no need to meet critical requirements for a building that might be used by people, as with an office or a home. Unveiled at the GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam at the end of September, the Daedalus Pavilion is a structure made from 48 different pieces 3Dprinted from Formfutura PLA filament over the course of three weeks.

While Facebook's facial recognition technology may be useful for tagging photos, some user believe that it violates their privacy. The gathering of this biometric data is the subject of a lawsuit filed against the social network in May, under a unique Illinois law. The Biometric Information Privacy Act allows for fines of between $1,000 (£818) and $5,000 (£4,092) each time a person's image is used without permission. Facebook could be in hot water over its facial recognition software. The social media giant was accused of violating users' privacy by collecting and storing biometric data without permission in order to make tagging suggestions Facebook has repeatedly faced criticism for removing posts that were said to violate its community standards.

Apple has posted its first decline in annual revenue and profit since 2001, as the company looks for a way to offset falling sales of its flaghship iPhone. The tech giant has never posted a decline in annual revenues since the release of the iPod - until this week, when Apple revealed an 8 per cent drop in sales to $215 billion (£176 million) for 2016. The decline in sales dragged the company's profits down by 14 per cent to $45.7billion. The drop in sales was mostly down to declining sales of the iPhone, which accounts for two-thirds of Apple sales. Apple sold 45.5 million iPhones in the quarter, which while better than expected, compares to 48 million sold this time last year.

Yoshua Bengio, one of the leading figures behind the rise of deep learning, is launching a Silicon Valley-style startup incubator dedicated to this enormously influential form of artificial intelligence. The incubator, Element.AI, will help build companies from AI research that emerges from the University of Montreal, where Bengio is a professor, and nearby McGill University, and he says this is just part of his efforts to develop an "AI ecosystem" in Montreal. Bengio says the Canadian city offers "the biggest concentration in the world" of academic researchers exploring deep learning, the breed of AI that now plays such an important role inside the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. "Element.AI will help entrepreneurs get started in that high-growth area, with a team of experts--and my help--to steer those companies in the right direction," he says. According to Bengio, about 100 researchers are exploring deep learning at the University of Montreal and about 50 others are doing similar work at McGill.

My colleague Amy Nicholson is the UK expert on Azure Machine Learning, the following blog post is after a quizzing session to get understand how to get started with Azure Machine Learning" Each student receives $100 of Azure credit per month, for 6 months. The Faculty member receives $250 per month, for 12 months. The Azure machine learning team provided a very nice walkthrough tutorial which covers a lot of the basics. This tutorial is really useful as it takes you through the entire process of creating an AzureML workspace, uploading data, creating an experiment to predict someone's credit risk, building, training, and evaluating the models, publishing your best model as a web service, and calling that web service. Now you need to learn how to import a data set into Azure Machine Learning, and where to find interesting data to build something amazing.

Widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. According to the Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide from IDC, the market for cognitive/AI solutions will experience a compound annual growth rate of 55.1% over the 2016-2020 forecast period. "Software developers and end user organisations have already begun the process of embedding and deploying cognitive/artificial intelligence into almost every kind of enterprise application or process," said David Schubmehl, research director, Cognitive Systems and Content Analytics at IDC. "Recent announcements by several large technology vendors and the booming venture capital market for AI startups illustrate the need for "Recent announcements by several large technology vendors and the booming venture capital market for AI startups illustrate the need for organisations to be planning and undertaking strategies that incorporate these wide-ranging technologies. Identifying, understanding, and acting on the use cases, technologies, and growth opportunities for cognitive/AI systems will be a differentiating factor for most enterprises and the digital disruption caused by these technologies will be significant." The ability to recognise and respond to data flows using algorithms and rule-based logic enables cognitive/AI systems to automate a broad range of functions across many industries. The use cases that are attracting the most investment in 2016 are automated customer service agents, quality management investigation and recommendation systems, diagnosis and treatment systems, and fraud analysis and investigation. The use cases that will experience the fastest revenue growth over the next five years are public safety and emergency response, pharmaceutical research and discovery, diagnosis and treatment systems, supply and logistics, quality management investigation and recommendation systems, and fleet management. The use cases that are attracting the most investment in 2016 are automated customer service agents, quality management investigation and recommendation systems, diagnosis and treatment systems, and fraud analysis and investigation. The use cases that will experience the fastest revenue growth over the next five years are public safety and emergency response, pharmaceutical research and discovery, diagnosis and treatment systems, supply and logistics, quality management investigation and recommendation systems, and fleet management. "Near-term opportunities for cognitive systems are in industries such as banking, securities and investments, and manufacturing," said Jessica Goepfert, program director, Customer Insights and Analysis at IDC. "In these segments, we find a wealth of unstructured data, a desire to harness insights from this information, and an openness to innovative technologies.

Artificial intelligence programs have beaten chess masters and TV quiz show champions. Two exchange operators have announced plans to launch artificial intelligence tools for market surveillance in the coming months and officials at a Wall Street regulator tell Reuters they are not far behind. Executives are hoping computers with humanoid wit can help mere mortals catch misbehavior more quickly. The software could, for instance, scrub chat-room messages to detect dubious bragging or back slapping around the time of a big trade. It could also more quickly unravel complex issues, like "layering," where orders are rapidly sent to exchanges and then canceled to artificially move a stock price.

A Swedish industry group says a court ruling that drones with cameras must have a license under the country's surveillance laws "is a huge blow" to recreational and commercial users. Gustav Gerdes, head of Unmanned Aerial System Sweden, says Friday's decision by the Supreme Administrative Court could put 5,000 jobs in danger -- from drone operators to those handling footage. He said Wednesday that Sweden was among the first countries to ban camera drones with no surveillance license, adding permits can be expensive and difficult to get. The European Aviation Safety Agency recently released a rough, non-binding text for drone regulation, leaving it up to EU members states to decide whether to require licenses for drones with cameras. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Computers could soon be able to decode your thoughts into actual speech or written words, without you even saying a word. COULD HACKERS GET INSIDE YOUR BRAIN? The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules.