The price tag still holds sway in our major shops and departments stores -- but the retail sector is moving away from fixed prices, and online businesses are leading the way. Prices already fluctuate online for certain products and services like airline fares, hotel rooms and ride-sharing services like Uber. One day you score a great deal, the next you end up paying a bit more than you wanted. Most people focus on the positive -- the bargain they got. But what if such flexibility and uncertainty was a feature of all your shopping? Until now, those variations have been dictated by the laws of supply and demand: a price surge algorithm detects a spike in demand and ups the charge -- following the fundamental logic of the market.

"Connected to other part," my iPhone says to me as I stand somewhere in London's Soho, trying to decipher the letter on the top of a bus stop. "Hello?" says an American woman, reminding me of Scarlett Johansson's disembodied artificially intelligent character from the sci-fi film Her. "Hey, er … can you give me a hand by reading the letter on the bus stop?" "Sure … can you move your phone a bit more up, and to the left … Ya! I thank her, end the session, pull up Citymapper and navigate my way onto the 453 going to New Cross. I have a little bit of vision, but only enough to see motion and movement. I am using an app called Be My Eyes, an app that connects blind and visually impaired people to sighted volunteers via a remote video connection. Through the phone's camera, the blind person is able to show the sighted individual what they are looking at in the real world, allowing the volunteer to assist them with any of their vision-related problems. I began to lose my sight in the summer of 2013 to a rare genetic mitochondrial disease called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and was soon registered blind. I consequently found myself relying on an assortment of assistive technologies to do the simplest of tasks. Be My Eyes has just over 35,000 visually-impaired users registered for the app and over half a million volunteers. Whenever a visually impaired user requests assistance a sighted volunteer receives a notification and a video connection is established. Jose Ranola, a 55-year-old from the Philippines who works in construction and has retinitis pigmentosa, said: "I use it to help me identify medicine and read printed materials and also to describe places and objects." He adds: "All my experiences were good.

Artificial intelligence could be the most revolutionary force affecting productivity in the United States economy, says the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. "Everyone in Silicon Valley thinks statisticians are mis-measuring the productivity provided by the internet, but it's not that," says John C. Williams, on a trip to Sydney this week. "Instead, the technologies that we now use and love mostly affect our consumption of leisure rather than affect our output in factories or offices." Positive data showing the US economy is nearing full employment and that inflation is edging higher prompted the US central bank to recently raise interest rates for the second time in three months. The US Fed also announced it will push ahead with plans to gradually shrink its $US4.5 trillion ($6 trillion) bond portfolio.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

In the twilight of his boxing career, Manny Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) may still have something left to prove. The Filipino icon currently serves in the Senate, but on Saturday he returns to the ring to face Jeff Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs), an inexperienced Australian who will be fighting in his hometown and in front of 50,000 spectators at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. But there is more to this fight than just a legend facing a relatively obscure boxer. The fight will be shown on ESPN, not pay-per-view or HBO, which has mostly been the home to Pacquiao fights over the past 10 years. The fight may also be viewed as a title-fight tune-up for Pacquiao, who at 38 years old may still have something left in him.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

Two driverless shuttles will begin operating at the University of Michigan this fall. The tall, airy, 15-passenger shuttles will carry students and staff in a two-mile loop on campus roads alongside regular traffic. The shuttle will be free and insured by the university. A driverless shuttle carries passengers at the University of Michigan, Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Two driverless shuttles will begin operating at the university this fall. The tall, airy, 15-passenger shuttles will carry students and staff in a two-mile loop on campus roads alongside regular traffic.

Entity resolution (ER) presents unique challenges for evaluation methodology. While crowdsourcing platforms acquire ground truth, sound approaches to sampling must drive labelling efforts. In ER, extreme class imbalance between matching and non-matching records can lead to enormous labelling requirements when seeking statistically consistent estimates for rigorous evaluation. This paper addresses this important challenge with the OASIS algorithm: a sampler and F-measure estimator for ER evaluation. OASIS draws samples from a (biased) instrumental distribution, chosen to ensure estimators with optimal asymptotic variance. As new labels are collected OASIS updates this instrumental distribution via a Bayesian latent variable model of the annotator oracle, to quickly focus on unlabelled items providing more information. We prove that resulting estimates of F-measure, precision, recall converge to the true population values. Thorough comparisons of sampling methods on a variety of ER datasets demonstrate significant labelling reductions of up to 83% without loss to estimate accuracy.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

We've written a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) here at Nanalyze, and just when we feel like there's not much more we can add to the topic, we find loads more interesting companies to write about. There has been a lot of talk lately about how machines just won't be able to capture that "human element" of emotions or "emotional intelligence" as it is often called. The act of building an emotional quotient or EQ as a layer on top of AI is being referred to as affective computing, a topic we covered before. The first step towards AI being able to demonstrate emotional intelligence, is that it needs to see emotions in our behaviour, hear our voices, and feel our anxieties. To do this, AI must be able to extract emotional cues or data from us through conventional means like eye tracking, galvanic skin response, voice and written word analysis, brain activity via EEG, facial mapping, and even gait analysis.