The e-commerce giant has been working with Expertmaker since 2010 to organise and crunch massive data sets. It will join eBay's structured data product and technology team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Amit Menipaz, vice president and general manager of structured data at eBay, said Expertmaker's expertise woulid help the auction site build a "best-in-class product catalogue". On its website, Expertmaker says that its "genetics-inspired multi-AI approach extracts hidden value in your data, turning chaotic and unstructured data into actionable knowledge to predict outcomes and optimize your business", which is handy considering eBay has more than 900 million listings scattered throughout its online catalogue.

Trash can be sticky, stinky, and sharp. The entrepreneurs at Jodone want to turn this mundane task into a human-robot collaborative game to improve efficiency and accuracy. For Jodone's new pilot project at the Pope/Douglas waste-to-energy facility in Alexandria, Minnesota, human operators will use its software to monitor waste as it travels along a conveyor belt. Using a touch screen, workers will swipe any recyclables they spot and then select the appropriate category: paper, plastic, tin, etc. Those instructions will be sent wirelessly to robotic arms that will grab the recyclables and drop them in the correct bin.

In an effort to make its apps more conversational, Google fed its AI engine a whopping 2,865 romance novels so it can improve its understanding of language. The idea is to improve the way Google products respond to users. Software engineer Andrew Dai, who led the project, told BuzzFeed News that this sort of work could help make the responses from the company's search app, as well as the'Smart Reply' feature in Inbox, more natural and varied. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Dai added that romance novels are great for training AI because they mostly follow the same plot – allowing the AI to focus on picking up nuances of language.

Contextual deep learning allows artificial intelligence machines to react in a more natural and intelligent way to the real-world auditory, visual or other type of data. According to Tech Spot, the concept of having a machine capable of reacting in an intelligent way has been until very recently a matter of science fiction. However, this concept is certainly very compelling and scientists were working on transform this into reality. We are now on the verge of creating this new reality. The general public, however, is not yet informed of what concepts such as neural networks, artificial intelligence and deep learning represent.

Later in May the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics will host the "CodeX FutureLaw Conference 2016," a fourth annual conference focusing on how technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the landscape of the legal profession, the law itself and how these changes impact us all. The event will feature several panel discussions, including one relating to IBM's Watson and related machine learning tools. However, the law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson--or for that matter HAL--or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms.

Professional stylists do the job for them and the personal shopping service ships the new clothes to their door. That combo is behind the success at Stitch Fix, a San Francisco-based online subscription and shopping service founded in 2011. "I think it's the single most salient aspect of our company," said Eric Colson, chief algorithms officer at Stitch Fix. "Our business is getting relevant things into the hands of our customers. This is the one thing we're going to be best in the world at. We couldn't do this with machines alone. We couldn't do this with humans alone. We're just trying to get them to combine their powers."

Facebook outlines its photo-tagging process in its terms of service and users can opt out of it. The lawsuit will decide whether this measure qualifies as explicit consent under the privacy act. "The Court accepts as true plaintiffs' allegations that Facebook's face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs' consent," U.S. District Judge James Donato wrote in his ruling. Facebook faced similar privacy concerns in Europe and Canada, and it stopped using the facial-recognition tech in those regions.

Very interesting data compiled and analyzed by O'Reilly, using statistical models such as Lasso regression to predict salary based on different factors. It reminds me our own analysis based on simulated (but realistic) data, to assess whether having Python or R (or both) commands a bigger salary, and what is the extra boost provided by these skills, individually. The statistical model used was Jackknife regression, and it was designed for tutorial purposes. The O'Reilly survey is much bigger, based on real data, and it includes many factors, as well as factor selection. It uses standard statistical techniques which might be less robust than Jackknife regression.

SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, for the second month in a row, following a Japanese satellite mission. The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle's main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform. Due to the high altitude of the mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing, but the Falcon 9 rocket touched down on the drone platform - nicknamed Of Course I Still Love You - just over eight minutes after launching. SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean after a delivering a Japanese satellite into orbit early this morning, and is the second rocket to successfully land in the space of a month. A company webcast showed the 23-story-tall rocketsoaring off a seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation at 1:21 am EDT (06:21 BST).

Online translators are getting better, but there's still room for improvement. Researchers are now contributing new artificial intelligence techniques that could help accurately build full sentences. Algorithms developed by researchers at the University of Liverpool give computers a human-like touch while translating words and languages. They believe their methods are key to improving accuracy. Using the algorithms, a computer will be able to translate a word from an unknown language, and then provide context to it.