There are over 13M men in the US who struggle with their weight, and this demographic is currently being underserved by the majority of health and weight loss programs. Lyle is the app that fills this gap through its AI-powered service that helps men reach their health and weight loss goals. Lyle's proprietary technology simulates conversations with a real dietitian to introduce accountability as well as offer personalized meal plans based on the user's goals and health needs. With a few clicks and integrations, the app enables users to conveniently order groceries for the week through third-party vendors like Shipt and Instacart to ensure they are hitting their dietary goals. AlleyWatch sat down with Philip Kasumu about how his personal experience in the fitness and bodybuilding realm inspired him to create an app to promote health and wellness tailored to each man.

With roughly the same population as the State of Missouri, Lebanon is a small country of six million people that borders Syria and Israel. Due to its location, the country has been subjected to a multitude of political and religious factions inhabiting the state. People frequently fight over whose invisible friend is better, and the country has faced long periods of instability including wars with Israel, civil wars and internal conflicts, and most recently some spillover from the Syrian war – which means lots of Syrians flying around on motorcycles. All of this turmoil has contributed to structural problems in the economy such as chronic fiscal deficits that have increased Lebanon's debt-to-GDP ratio to the third highest in the world. Economic growth has slowed to 1-2% over the past decade which constrains government investments in necessary infrastructure improvements. Notwithstanding these challenges, day to day life in Lebanon is pretty awesome.

When will tech singularity arrive, if it ever arrives? Ray Kurzweil, famous for his Singularity optimism, insists that day is in 2029, so in one decade! Many other academics think on the other hand that it will never happen. Humans are also growing and changing at incredible pace) is a never ending journey, and so is human consciousness. After all technological evolution results from the joint effort of humans designing machines that transform each other. Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, says something similar, about what he sees as a kind of hype, concerning AI: "We're currently climbing a hill, and we are all excited because we have made a lot of progress on climbing the hill, but as we approach the top of the hill, we can start to see a series of other hills rising in front of us."

Killer robots that make life-or-death decisions on the basis of anonymous data sets, and completely beyond human control, are already a shockingly real prospect today,

Tumblr has said it does not regret its decision to ban adult content despite a fifth of its users deserting the blogging platform. The so-called porn ban came into effect on 17 December, provoking widespread criticism from its users. Many argued that the ban targeted LGBT, sex-positive and NSFW art communities. "We made a strategic decision for the business that better positions it for long-term growth among more types of users," a Tumblr spokesperson told The Independent. "This was the right decision."

This smartphone-controlled vacuum is an amazing addition to you home, especially at this sale price. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Nothing gets us excited quite like a good robot vacuum sale, and there's one that started today youdon't want to miss. Ecovacs makes a smart robot vacuum called the Deebot N79S that works with a smartphone app as well as with Alexa and Google Home.

After a few years of testing its robot valets, Stanley Robotics will officially put its fleet to use at France's Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport this week. If you plan to park in the robot-lot anytime soon, you'll leave your car in a special garage-like box. One of Stanley's robots will literally pick up your car and deliver it to a spot. When you return, the system will use your flight information to determine when to bring your car back to a box, where you can pick it up and drive off. As the company says, that should mean no waiting or searching the parking lot.

People attend Shoptalk, a retail and technology conference in Las Vegas. If you weren't at Shoptalk in Las Vegas last week, you missed a great conference. Shoptalk has evolved into a must-attend retail event with more than 8,000 attendees and growing, a destination where retailers and brands go to learn and collaborate and where networking opportunities are key. The conference included content on the latest retail trends around technology, data, and wins and losses in the online vs brick-and-mortar battle. Here are my key takeaways from the conference.

We don't know why deep learning forms of neural networks achieve great success on many tasks; the discipline has a paucity of theory to explain its empirical successes. As Facebook's Yann LeCun has said, deep learning is like the steam engine, which preceded the underlying theory of thermodynamics by many years. It would be the harbinger of an entirely new medium of calculation, harnessing the powers of subatomic particles to obliterate the barriers of time in solving incalculable problems. But some deep thinkers have been plugging away at the matter of theory for several years now. On Wednesday, the group presented a proof of deep learning's superior ability to simulate the computations involved in quantum computing.

Apple says Spotify is trying to keep all the benefits it offers, but without paying anything back, in an extraordinary response to a growing fight between the two firms. The company's statement came after Spotify said that Apple was abusing the dominance that the iPhone gave it in a complaint to European regulators. It also established a website in which it said Apple was not being fair, keeping too much of the revenues from its subscribers for itself and banning Spotify from launching new products. Spotify pointed to the 30 per cent tax that Apple charges on any purchases made through its own systems, arguing that cost should be reduced. It also suggested that Apple had banned it from launching new features, such as an Apple Watch app.