Amazon is offering up $25 gift cards in exchange for 3D scans of your body. The internet giant is currently conducting a study at its New York office as part of Amazon Body Labs that seeks to'learn about diversity among body shapes,' according to a listing, which was first spotted by Mashable. Participants who set up a 30-minute appointment will be asked to take a survey and agree to have 3D scans, photos and videos taken of them. The move comes as Amazon has faced privacy concerns around its collection of data from Echo devices, as well as the deployment of its controversial facial recognition software. Amazon is offering up $25 gift cards in exchange for 3D scans of your body.

This week Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got the tech sector's attention with emerging reports of his "fascination" with the rapidly developing world of autonomous autos. "If you think about the auto industry right now, there's so many things going on with Uber-ization, electrification, the connected car -- so it's a fascinating industry," Bezos said. "It's going to be something very interesting to watch and participate in, and I'm very excited about that whole industry." Amazon has made some sizable investments to accompany that interest -- most notably in automation and electrification start-up Rivian and self-driving startup Aurora. And fascination aside, Amazon has a race for the consumer's whole paycheck to vie in with Walmart -- and there is little doubt that auto automation plays like Rivian and Aurora could put some octane, so to speak, behind that effort.

Invento CEO Balaji Vishwanathan (right) and an employee interact with Spod, next to MITRI, a humanoid developed by the firm. At an office in HSR Layout, a box-shaped robot, mounted with a tablet, moves along the office floor while avoiding objects. As it detects a human face, it stops to greet and introduce itself: "Greetings, I'm Spod. I'm here to help you shop." Spod is an artificial intelligence-enabled robotic shopping assistant that visitors to supermarkets may well see in near future.

Some of Amazon's warehouse workers don't have to choose between work and play with the introduction of company-created video games that turn tedious tasks into productive fun. A detailed report from The Washington Post describes how the company has installed screens at many of its warehouse workers' stations that allow employees to turn tasks like assembling orders and moving items into competitive games. Game titles include options like MissionRacer, Dragon Duel, and CastleCrafter and typically involve a productivity-based point system. The more tasks a worker completes, the more points or progress they make in the game. Amazon is using video games to help increase productivity and make working in its warehouses less tedious.

The wide and rapid adoption of deep learning by practitioners brought unintended consequences in many situations such as in the infamous case of Google Photos' racist image recognition algorithm; thus, necessitated the utilization of the quantified uncertainty for each prediction. There have been recent efforts towards quantifying uncertainty in conventional deep learning methods (e.g., dropout as Bayesian approximation); however, their optimal use in decision making is often overlooked and understudied. In this study, we propose a mixed-integer programming framework for classification with reject option (also known as selective classification), that investigates and combines model uncertainty and predictive mean to identify optimal classification and rejection regions. Our results indicate superior performance of our framework both in non-rejected accuracy and rejection quality on several publicly available datasets. Moreover, we extend our framework to cost-sensitive settings and show that our approach outperforms industry standard methods significantly for online fraud management in real-world settings.

Amazon might want to consider placing more of its delivery drivers in uniforms, based on a comment from one of its higher-profile customers. Ice T, the rapper who later became a TV star on "Law & Order: SVU," posted a tweet on Tuesday claiming he almost shot one of the tech giant's drivers who was "creeping up to my crib" the night before to complete a delivery. "Message To Amazon: Now that you have regular people making your home deliveries.. Maybe they should wear a Vest with AMAZON DELIVERY on it," said Ice T on Twitter. In a follow-up tweet, Ice T said he wasn't mad at the delivery person but noted it's not safe for the drivers to operate without some type of uniform. Message To Amazon: Now that you have regular people making your home deliveries.. Maybe they should wear a Vest with AMAZON DELIVERY on it..... Amazon customer service reached out to Ice T on Twitter, saying his comments would be escalated to the company's logistics team for review.

Walmart has opened a store in Levittown, N.Y. that is intended to showcase the power of artificial intelligence. The store, announced last week, is packed with video cameras, digital screens, and over 100 servers, making it appear more like a corporate data center than a discount retailer. All that machinery helps Walmart automatically track inventory so that it knows when toilet paper is running low or that milk needs restocking. The company's goal is to create "a glimpse into the future of retail," when computers rather than humans are expected to do a lot of retail's grunt work. Walmart's push into artificial intelligence highlights how retailers are increasingly adding data crunching to their brick and mortar stores.

By Tushar Kaushik IN YOUR CART AI-enabled shopping assistant Spod can suggest products based on customer's age, gender. At an office in HSR Layout, a boxshaped robot, mounted with a tablet, moves along the office floor while avoiding objects. As it detects a human face, it stops to greet and introduce itself: "Greetings, I'm Spod. I'm here to help you shop." Spod is an artificial intelligence-enabled robotic shopping assistant that visitors to supermarkets may well see in near future.

In this Oct. 31, 2018, file photo, a man, who declined to be identified, has his face painted to represent efforts to defeat facial recognition during a protest at Amazon headquarters over the company's facial recognition system, "Rekognition," in Seattle. San Francisco is on track to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by police and other city agencies. These days, with facial recognition technology, you've got a face that can launch a thousand applications, so to speak. Sure, you may love the ease of opening your phone just by facing it instead of tapping in a code. But how do you feel about having your mug scanned, identifying you as you drive across a bridge, when you board an airplane or to confirm you're not a stalker on your way into a Taylor Swift concert?

Ever wished there was a way to know if your favorite Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor is currently available in a grocery store near you? Instacart's machine learning team has built tools to figure that out! Our marketplace's scale lets us build sophisticated prediction models. Our community of over 70,000 personal shoppers scans millions of items per day across 15,000 physical stores and delivers them to the customers. These stores belong to our grocery retail partners like Aldi, Costco, Krogers, Safeway, and Wegmans.