Today, eBay announced it has agreed to acquire Sweden-based Expertmaker, which specializes in providing intelligent solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and big data analytics. Expertmaker has been a partner of eBay's since 2010, most recently helping with eBay's structured data initiative. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, Expertmaker's employees will join eBay's structured data product and technology team. Expertmaker's Founder and CEO, Lars Hard, will join as Director, Data Science reporting into Amit Menipaz's organization.

In as little as 20 years, all of the jobs that we do today could be performed by robots. A lot of people are concerned this will create massive unemployment. But I look forward to the robots taking over. I'm not saying this just to curry favour with our new robot overlords; but I think life is going to be a whole lot better. Steve Wozniak recently suggested that we will become robots' pets.

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs -- Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the '40s and '50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories -- traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes -- stretching back centuries and, depending how you count, even millennia. The word "robot" made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel?apek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum's Universal Robots.

Two miles apart in Palo Alto, workers from Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. are hustling to establish a role for their companies in a future in which consumers don't own cars and the vehicles steer themselves. On Thursday, it became ever more clear that the Michigan automakers and their West Coast outposts won't be going at it alone. They'll be depending big time on software-developing neighbors in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Ford announced an 182.2-million investment in Pivotal Software Inc., a San Francisco company whose programs are already used by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Allstate Corp., to quickly develop their own computer applications. "Expanding our business to be both an auto and mobility company requires leading-edge software expertise," Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields said in a statement.

Last year, he told Wall Street analysts that eBay looks at the world through listings, which unlike the catalog approach (used by Amazon, for example), are transient. They come and go and don't have "link equity," he said, "and they're hard to attach content to." One eBay executive referred to the initiative as "make or break" for eBay. Expertmaker founder and CEO Lars Hard will join as Director of Data Science and will report to Menipaz. Prior to founding Expertmaker, Hard was involved in founding a variety of startups with a focus in advanced AI, machine learning, math and big data, including Lytics.ai and Dragonfire Research.

An artificial intelligence (AI) device may sit and (perhaps) pass the national college entrance exam ("gaokao") in math in 2017, a tech company said Thursday. The AI test taker, part of a project by the Ministry of Science and Technology, was designed by Chengdu Zhun Xing Yun Xue Technology Co., Ltd. According to the plan, the AI will attend next year's gaokao math test, usually on June 7, along with millions of Chinese students. Like its human peers, it will be asked to complete a 150-point math test in two hours in a room without Internet access. Fu Hongguang, who leads the development team, said the key to passing the exam includes understanding the language and knowledge inference.

When hearing the words arts and fashion, eccentric designer clothes and Pablo Picasso are probably the first two things that comes in mind. But what if artificial intelligence is added in the picture? Can AI revolutionize human culture or will it create a new culture for themselves? The rise of artificial intelligence has become one of the most debatable issues in the society today. In fact, the online realm has recently been filled with AI news and discoveries, spawning several questions and stirring controversies about its risks and benefits to humanity.

The famous inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has made some very bold predictions about the pace at which human technology is advancing toward the ultimate threshold. That threshold is known as "The Singularity." That epithet is a metaphor borrowed from physics terminology to express the point at which information technology--specifically artificial intelligence--becomes sufficiently advanced as to irreversibly alter the course of history on earth. While The Singularity may be a familiar cautionary tale told by renowned thinkers such as Bill Gates, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking, and artistically explored through the famous sci-trope of sentient robots, e.g. But that depends on how you choose to define doom, specifically.

Most people probably have no idea they encounter artificial intelligence technology at nearly every turn on the Internet. It's how retailers track shoppers' behavior and show them ads that attempt to match their tastes in clothing or electronics. While that's a relatively simply use of artificial intelligence, often known as just AI, researchers, entrepreneurs, and US government officials are investing heavily into moving much more advanced AI into health care for such pursuits as drug research, automotive technology like self-driving cars, and even for teaching computers how to track and defend themselves against hackers. In fact, within the past year, security startups, leading academics, government agencies, and some of the largest digital security firms in the country have invested heavily in AI technology for cybersecurity, believing that recent advancements in processing power could allow computers to outperform humans when it comes to many aspects of defending networks. "Just imagine a world in which bots are out there looking for vulnerabilities and other bots or artificial intelligence is simultaneously poking holes, plugging holes, poking back," said Ryan Calo, a law professor and director of the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington, a think tank that examines cybersecurity and AI policy.

To do this, from eBay they have the initiative structured data, which today receives an important boost by the acquisition of Expertmaker, Sweden-based company specializing in based on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and analysis of large volumes solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As the operation is complete, Expertmaker employees will be part of the structured product data and technology eBay, where the founder and CEO of Expertmaker, hard Lars, joins as team manager. By way of context, Expertmaker is a member of eBay since 2010, where he is helping eBay recently with the aforementioned initiative. Otherwise how could both companies share the benefits of the acquisition, which from eBay believe that innovation and significant experience Expertmaker allowed to develop a better product catalog that can take clients, noting that its technology, experience and engineers play an important role in advancing the initiative of structured eBay data, while from Expertmaker feel happy to join the team of eBay offering capabilities artificial intelligence, machine learning and optimization technology on a large scale to the aforementioned initiative.