An online learning program which can tell when a student is becoming bored and inattentive is one of the key developments forecast to reshape university education in Australia in the next five years, according to a new report. The 2016 NMC Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education says that so-called "affective computing", which is able to use video imagery of facial expressions to discern human emotions, will soon be coupled with online learning platforms to encourage students to keep their minds on their work. The report says this is likely to be adopted by universities in the next four to five years. It forecast "online learning situations wherein a computerised tutor reacts to facial cues of boredom in a student in an effort to motivate or boost their confidence." "Software technology will literally learn to learn, interpreting and responding to learners' most nuanced gestures and emotions – whether they are feeling bored, intimidated or satisfied," says Brenda Frisk, head of learning technology at Open Universities Australia, a partner in the report.

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Save eBay? By The Street For eBay (EBAY), artificial intelligence could prove to be its salvation. The San Jose, Calif.-based e-commerce giant, which has been working to transform itself after spinning off PayPal Holdings (PYPL) last year, could reap some huge benefits if it can find out a way to effectively use AI, according to analysts. At the Code Conference earlier this month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed that the company started getting very serious about using artificial intelligence last year, noting that e-commerce is essentially a data business and that AI may be more important for eBay than its peers due to the "breadth of its inventory." Wenig further explained that eBay plans to formulate a strategy focused on using data to predict what consumers might want and offering a wide selection of products.

The seabed holds some fascinating historical secrets, but unlike monuments on land, they're largely hidden from view. Now, archaeologists in the United Kingdom are using 3D printing to bring two historical shipwrecks to life for history enthusiasts and experts alike. Using data from photogrammetry (measuring the distance between objects from photographs) and sonar imaging, the researchers have produced scale models of a 17th-century shipwreck near Drumbeg, in Scotland, and the remains of the HMHS Anglia, a steamship that was used as a floating hospital during World War I. The steamship was sunk by a mine off the south coast of England. "It was a proof of concept for us, trying to establish what could be done using sound and light, but there are so many different applications you could use this for," said maritime archaeologist John McCarthy, a project manager at Wessex Archaeology who carried out dives at the Scottish site and was in charge of producing the 3D models.

We've noticed a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) among online marketplaces, including eBay (eBay CEO Devin Wenig said AI technology will render the search box redundant), Alibaba (invested in Twiggle), and Amazon (CEO Jeff Bezos said we're at the beginning of a golden age of AI). According to Facebook's detailed post published on Wednesday, June 1, DeepText is a deep-learning artificial intelligence system that is able to understand the content of several thousand posts per second. The system will also be able to filter out malicious, hateful, or hurtful speech on the social network, along with photos that contravene Facebook's policies. Published By: Eunice Gettys on June 5, 2016 08:37 am EST Microsoft Corporation ( NASDAQ:MSFT) announced back in March that Windows 10 had exceeded 300 million active users, calculating from when the operating system was launched in mid-2015, making it the company's most successful operating system ever. Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business.

Driverless trucks will be safer and cheaper than their human-controlled counterparts, but that doesn't mean America's 3.5 million professional truck drivers are giving up to the machines without a fight. Across the US, truckers collectively haul more than 10bn tons of freight each year, but it's a tough job – the hours are long and lonely, the pay is low and the lifestyle is sedentary. "Picture the taxi drivers around the world acting in response to Uber," says Andy Stern, the former former president of the Service Employees International Union, referring to protests and violence that erupted in many cities as the 62.5bn Silicon Valley on-demand ride-hailing firm challenged conventional, regulated taxis. "Truck drivers will follow a similar pattern," says Stern. "There will be disruption in different places. You can imagine people ringing state capitals with their trucks."

Blizzard, the developer behind games like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has confirmed it is having issues with its Battle.net Reports of players not being able to log in to Battle.net Blizzard's customer service has since confirmed the problem. We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. It is unclear if the problem arose because of a technical issue or if it was caused by a malicious attack.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND – A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it is ready to roll right now. Arizona-based startup Local Motors is offering Olli, an electric minibus capable of carrying 12 people. It says the vehicle can be produced to order by 3-D printing. Olli was designed as an on-demand transportation solution that passengers can summon with a mobile app, like Uber rides. And it can be "printed" to specification in "micro factories" in a matter of hours. Olli will be demonstrated in National Harbor, Maryland, over the next few months with additional trials expected in Las Vegas and Miami.

Olli will be exclusive to DC these next few months, but Miami and Las Vegas will get their own in late 2016. Local Motors is also in talks to test the bus in cities outside the US, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra. It's unclear if anyone can get the chance to ride one, since these are merely trial runs, but you can ask local authorities if the EV makes its way to your city. If and when the time comes that driverless public vehicles can legally shuttle passengers, you'll be able to summon an Olli through an app, just like Uber. And if Local Motors' plans pan out, a lot of people around the globe will be using that app: Company co-founder John Rogers envisions building hundreds of micro-factories all over the world that can 3D print an Olli within 10 hours and assemble it one.

The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others -- and these ten are the most significant. Just a quick refresher before we get started. Though there's no formal definition, computer scientists describe algorithms as a set of rules that define a sequence of operations.

It has been noticed that some external CVIs exhibit a preferential bias towards a larger or smaller number of clusters which is monotonic (directly or inversely) in the number of clusters in candidate partitions. This type of bias is caused by the functional form of the CVI model. For example, the popular Rand index (RI) exhibits a monotone increasing (NCinc) bias, while the Jaccard Index (JI) index suffers from a monotone decreasing (NCdec) bias. This type of bias has been previously recognized in the literature. In this work, we identify a new type of bias arising from the distribution of the ground truth (reference) partition against which candidate partitions are compared. We call this new type of bias ground truth (GT) bias. This type of bias occurs if a change in the reference partition causes a change in the bias status (e.g., NCinc, NCdec) of a CVI. For example, NCinc bias in the RI can be changed to NCdec bias by skewing the distribution of clusters in the ground truth partition. It is important for users to be aware of this new type of biased behaviour, since it may affect the interpretations of CVI results. The objective of this article is to study the empirical and theoretical implications of GT bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first extensive study of such a property for external cluster validity indices.