Alibaba has gone from an ecommerce company to its own economy. The Tmall Global Shopping day recorded 120.7 billion RMB (17.8 billion USD) is sales on one day. At their Single's Day event earlier this year, they revealed some interesting plans for the coming future. Robotics, AI, AR, and VR will be adopted across sectors like ecommerce, logistics, service sector, and finance to make user's daily life smarter. YunOS, a cloud-based data and service oriented operating system for the Internet of Things, will power a wide range of smart devices including smartphones, wearables, Internet cars, robots, and smart household appliances.

UPDATE: 12:52 p.m. EST - Following user reported outages across the globe, Blizzard Entertainment said Wednesday a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack has stopped and encouraged users of its games to attempt to log back into their systems. The DDOS attacks against network providers that we were monitoring have ended. If you are still unable to log in try https://t.co/Mce1fu5ZI9 Original story - Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of wildly popular video games like "World of Warcraft" and "Diablo," announced Wednesday that a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack had affected connections to its games. We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.

More of Earth's surface is covered by liquid water now than three decades ago. But some countries in Central Asia and the Middle East have lost more than half their surface water, satellite images show. There have also been losses in the US and Australia. The changes are mainly a result of activities such as irrigation and dam building, but climate change is playing a part too. Previous studies of surface water have largely relied on how much water countries estimate they have..

Richard Lee's attempt to renew his passport was blocked after he submitted the picture to an online passport photo checker run by New Zealand's department of internal affairs. The automated system told the 22-year-old engineering student the photo was invalid because his eyes were closed, even though they were clearly open, according to a copy of the notification posted on social media site Facebook. "No hard feelings on my part, I've always had very small eyes and facial recognition technology is relatively new and unsophisticated," Lee told Reuters. "It was a robot, no hard feelings. I got my passport renewed in the end."

In 2013, Russia's parliament unanimously passed a law forbidding "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations", essentially making it illegal to distribute any material on gay relationships or gay rights via the internet or any other kind of media, or to hold gay pride marches or rallies. The move led to an immediate rise in homophobic hate crime. So far, targets have included Ikea (for the crime of including gay couples in its catalogue), sports events run by LGBT-friendly organisations, and perhaps most famously, the Sochi Olympics. This week, Russian MPs took aim at what might seem like an unlikely target: EA Sports' Fifa 17, the latest entry in an annual series of football games that routinely sells over 20m copies year. What's so gay about Fifa, you might ask?

I was recently interviewed at the Robotic Process Automation and Artificual Intelligence in Summit in December 2016 in London. Here's a discussion on how organizations worldwide are building their Digital Workforce. Organizations worldwide are building their Digital Workforce. The countdown has begun and we foresee 3 Million Digital Workers by 2020. We believe that Human workers, alongside the Digital bots, creates a hyper productive workforce and building a Digital Workforce is about talent augmentation, not talent replacement.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

Employers: do the ladies on your payroll have any "female weaknesses" that would make them mentally or physically unfit for the job? The question comes to you courtesy of the year 1943. It was posed in a guide to hiring women, written for the flummoxed male supervisors at Transportation Magazine tasked with integrating a new female workforce during a wartime shortage of manpower. Back then, you wouldn't be surprised to see logical reasoning like "Men are to programmers as women are to homemakers". Or "Men are to surgeons what women are to nurses".

JPL and National Cancer Institute Renew Big Data Partnership Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries. The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia is developing artificial intelligence technology to help with cyber security, fraud detection and regulatory compliance, in a sign banks are attempting to put the power of big data to use in reducing risk. CBA's chief information officer David Whiteing told The Australian Financial Review that so-called machine learning technology will be used to help the bank make sense of large sets of "noisy" data and alert management to areas requiring their attention. The work will come alongside a broader program of innovative projects investigating the possibilities of technologies such as the internet of things, quantum computing and the blockchain. "When you have a large data set and people can't see the signal for the noise, machine learning capability will sift out and provide you with the top five things that are worthy of further investigation," Mr Whiteing said.