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.

It has taken 10 years, but Elon Musk has finally got to the punchline. The Tesla CEO has revealed the company's new car: the Model Y, the last part of one of Mr Musk's many long term plans. It means that the company now makes the Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y. Parked next to each other, the model numbers spell out S3XY. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

To evaluate the performance, agreement, and efficiency of a fully convolutional network (FCN) for liver lesion detection and segmentation at CT examinations in patients with colorectal liver metastases (CLMs). This retrospective study evaluated an automated method using an FCN that was trained, validated, and tested with 115, 15, and 26 contrast material–enhanced CT examinations containing 261, 22, and 105 lesions, respectively. Manual detection and segmentation by a radiologist was the reference standard. Performance of fully automated and user-corrected segmentations was compared with that of manual segmentations. The interuser agreement and interaction time of manual and user-corrected segmentations were assessed. Analyses included sensitivity and positive predictive value of detection, segmentation accuracy, Cohen κ, Bland-Altman analyses, and analysis of variance. Automated detection and segmentation of CLM by using deep learning with convolutional neural networks, when manually corrected, improved efficiency but did not substantially change agreement on volumetric measurements. Supplemental material is available for this article. A deep learning method shows promise for facilitating detection and segmentation of colorectal liver metastases; user correction of three-dimensional automated segmentations can generally resolve deficiencies of fully automated segmentation for small metastases and is faster than manual three-dimensional segmentation. Per-lesion sensitivity for lesions smaller than 10 mm was very low with automated segmentation (0.10) but was higher for user-corrected segmentation (0.30–0.57) and manual segmentation (0.58–0.70).

More and more frequently, schools across the United States are turning to artificial intelligence-backed solutions to stop tragic acts of student violence. Companies like Bark Technologies, Gaggle.net, and Securly, Inc., are using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) along with trained human safety experts to scan student emails, texts, documents, and in some cases, social media activity. They're looking for warning signs of cyber bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol use, depression, and to flag students who may pose a violent risk not only to themselves, but to classmates as well. Any potential problems discovered trigger alerts to school administration, parents, and law enforcement officials, depending on the severity. Bark ran a test pilot of its program with 25 schools in fall 2017. Bark chief parent officer, Titania Jordan, says, "We found some pretty alarming issues, including a bombing and school shooting threat."

We're into our second year of publishing a "Global AI Race" series of articles on artificial intelligence startups from around the world and it continues to pose a challenge. We use an objective measure of "total funding taken in so far" and that excludes any firms that choose not to disclose funding or are bootstrapped. We search for various categorizations like "artificial intelligence" or "deep learning" and that means we'll miss any firms that haven't chosen those categories in their Crunchbase profile. But the ones we worry about the most are those firms that we might include in one of our "top AI startups" lists that don't actually do AI. It's a huge problem, and one that was highlighted recently by a European venture capital firm, MMC Ventures, that surveyed 2,830 startups in Europe that were classified as being AI companies and found out that 44% of these companies were incorrectly classified as being "AI startups."