Blue Origin is now in the running to put Americans back on the moon by 2024. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has revealed the ambitious next steps for his aerospace company at a highly-secretive media event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. During the event, which kicked off at 4 p.m., the billionaire and Blue Origin founder started off by sharing elaborate concept images of self-sustaining space habitats reminiscent of the film Interstellar, with lush greenery and futuristic homes within its walls. But, the real star of the talk turned out to be something much closer to home – the moon. On stage, Bezos took the wraps off a massive model of what will be the firm's first lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon.

Nike Fit will utilize smartphone cameras and augmented reality to scan users' feet and measure the full shape of both feet. If you don't know which size shoe to buy when ordering sneakers online, the world's largest shoe company is rolling out a possible solution. Nike is introducing a feature to its app that lets you scan your feet using your smartphone camera to determine what size shoe will be the perfect fit. Aptly titled, Nike Fit, the AR tool seeks to replace the steel measurement device that you find under the seats at your local shoe store. It's a timely development as more consumers shift their shopping habits online.

Most of the successful commercial applications to date--in areas such as computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language processing--have involved supervised learning, taking advantage of labeled datasets. However, most of the world's data is unlabeled. In this book, we will cover the field of unsupervised learning (which is a branch of machine learning used to find hidden patterns) and learn the underlying structure in unlabeled data. According to many industry experts, such as Yann LeCun, the Director of AI Research at Facebook and a professor at NYU, unsupervised learning is the next frontier in AI and may hold the key to AGI. For this and many other reasons, unsupervised learning is one of the trendiest topics in AI today.

Last year, Amazon announced the beta release of Alexa Guard, a new service that lets customers who are leaving the house instruct their Echo devices to listen for glass breaking or smoke and carbon dioxide alarms going off. At this year's International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, our team is presenting several papers on sound detection. I wrote about one of them a few weeks ago, a new method for doing machine learning with unbalanced data sets. Today I'll briefly discuss two others, both of which, like the first, describe machine learning systems. One paper addresses the problem of media detection, or recognizing when the speech captured by a digital-assistant device comes from a TV or radio rather than a human speaker.

Revealed before its upcoming software developer conference, the company is now said to be focusing more on providing cloud-based computing and software services to other businesses. One of Microsoft's new offerings is an AI-powered service that helps online retailers recommend products based on shopping history. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's head of artificial intelligence, spoke about how the new solution can be combined with a retailer's existing recommendation engine: "They're using ours in addition to the existing system they had and seeing some tremendous wins in terms of productivity as part of it. "I don't think it's going to be necessarily always a winner takes all." When it comes to #AI, there's a difference between can and should. When it comes to @SatyaNadella's Vision Keynote at #MSBuild this year, you can and you should tune in. May 6. Get ready ---- pic.twitter.com/L8JutUpJdi In addition to this, Microsoft will launch a cloud-based blockchain service in collaboration with JP Morgan Chase & Co. According to Guthrie, this system has multiple uses, such as documenting transactions and tracking goods as the move along the logistics chain. Guthrie added: "That enables them, from a quality control perspective, to dramatically improve the end-to-end supply chain and deliver a better product.

The week is already off to a fun start with these great sales and deals. 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. From savings on robot vacuums to the latest fashions, the best online deals can help you save more money than you even thought possible on your favorite products. With Mother's Day right around the corner, these sales can also help you grab something in time for the holiday.

Make Mom proud by making a financially responsible choice when you buy her an awesome Mother's Day gift from one of these awesome sales. 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. Still haven't bought Mom that special something yet for Mother's Day? Don't worry--the clock may be ticking, but time hasn't run out just yet. While this holiday, which falls on Sunday, May 12, is the perfect opportunity to treat your mom (or that awesome person in your life who feels like a surrogate mother) to a great gift that'll help them know how much they mean to you, actually shopping for the best gifts for Mother's Day can be stressful.

This week is starting off strong for deals. 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. There is no better way to ease into the work week than with a little online window shopping. And if you're going to distract yourself from your work or your to-do list, you might as well start with what's on sale, right?

This time, artificial intelligence is literally taking jobs. Documents obtained by The Verge show how Amazon used a computer system to automatically track and fire hundreds of fulfillment center employees between for failing to meet productivity quotas -- a grim glimpse of a future in which AI is your boss. While not every decision was made by a computer system, the documents -- including a signed letter by an Amazon attorney describing the system -- reveal how deeply automated the process really is. It's not clear whether Amazon is still using the system. "Amazon's system tracks the rates of each individual associate's productivity," reads the letter as quoted by The Verge, "and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors." After this story ran, Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson reached out with a statement that pushed back against The Verge's reporting -- but failed to provide specific examples of inaccuracies.

So you're the CEO of a clothing retailer, a rental car agency, or a payroll processing company, and you hear that artificial intelligence is changing the world. What are you supposed to do? The short answer, says Paul Oyer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is to start learning fast. "Artificial intelligence will affect every industry, whether it's clothing or shipping," says Oyer, a professor of economics and the codirector of a new multidisciplinary course on AI for senior executives. "We need to find a complementary relationship between those who deal with the technology of AI and the managers who understand what drives their companies. Managers don't need to learn all the technical details, but they do need to understand the implications for their business."