Could the future of online shopping be as simple as sketching out what you're looking for and letting a computer figure out the rest? They've taught a deep learning neural network -- an incredibly powerful tool that mimics the way that the human brain works -- to recognize hand-drawn sketches and use them to search for real-life products. The network was "trained" to match sketches to photos based on a data set consisting of around 30,000 sketch-photo comparisons. From these it learned to interpret the way that people depict real objects in hand drawing. Most impressive of all is the fact that the sketches drawn by users don't even have to be all that detailed -- but the more detail users do add, the more accurate the search results become.

By 2020 50% or more of the U.S. workforce are expected to be on-demand workers / contingent workers in the liquid workforce. Zoondy capitalizes on this paradigm shift by utilizing a commodity brokerage approach to create a marketplace for seasoned professionals to sell their skills and expertise in four unique ways: free, fixed price, auction and goal pricing. Zoondy provides a secure, structured market environment for buyers and sellers of professional high-skill expertise to transact for the knowledge, expertise and skills that they need on a short term or project basis. While most associate freelance and on–demand workers with creative engagements, at best or un-skilled hourly gig workers, at worst, like Uber drivers, Fivver or Upwork; Zoondy targets the 43 million seasoned professionals, retirees and work-from-home executives who have proven expertise that can be shared locally or globally with businesses both small and large. For seasoned professionals, a Zoondy profile takes only minutes to set up and when completed the platform immediately begins marketing a user's skills.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Messenger would open up to branded chatbots at the F8 conference in April, 1-800 Flowers' was the example he used in his demo. "I love this one," he said. "It's pretty ironic: To order from 1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again." With the "chatbot gold rush" now in full swing, Facebook's launch partner should be a good barometer for the success of Messenger bots so far. Two months in, is anyone getting roses besides the recipient of Zuck's announcement flowers, head Messenger honcho David Marcus?

The jobs at highest risk are those in the transport and retail sectors. In fact the transport sector could have 1.5 million jobs, that's 74% of the current workforce, replaced with automation and 60% of retail. Not surprising when you see how popular online shopping has become - who needs a high street shop? Almost 750,000 have been lost in manufacturing to automation just in the last 15 years alone. Even Stephen Hawking the renowned scientist fears that AI or Artificial Intelligence could eventually spell the end of the human race.

The knock at the door from a harassed delivery driver clutching a plastic bag full of food could be about to end. A fleet of autonomous wheeled drones are to be used on the streets of central London to carry meals ordered through the Just Eat takeaway app. Meals will be placed inside the insulated compartments of the droids and customers will be given a secure code to open them when it arrives at their door. Customers order their food online and are given a secret code which will give access to the six-wheel drone (pictured) upon arrival at their door. Unlike robots designed to resemble humans, the Starship's bot is purely functional with a large compartment to hold deliveries, the equivalent size of two grocery bags.

Most retailers should be familiar with Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant that works through the company's Echo wireless speaker. Until recently Alexa could order product based upon a spoken command as long as it was something that you had previously ordered. While this was powerful Amazon has a larger goal in mind. This past week saw Amazon announce that Alexa now has more than 1,400 'skills', applications that Alexa is integrated to. For example, you can order an Uber simply by speaking to Alexa or organize a new playlist of songs from your music library.

Someone at Google really likes sneakers: The company has just bought a French machine learning startup that taught a computer how to recognize 15,000 different types of them. Paris-based Moodstocks builds image and object recognition software using deep learning techniques, and offered an Android app and visual search API that could recognize certain kinds of object. By analyzing video from a smartphone camera, and correlating it with accelerometer readings to determine how the camera is moving around, the software is able to infer information about the three-dimensional shape of objects in the video, facilitating their recognition. In February 2015 the company demonstrated its ability to identify sneakers through its app. Three months later, after training the software using 15,000 photos of shoes from an online retailer's website, Moodstocks claimed to be able to shop online for all the sneakers on sale in a Macy's store. Google has been introducing elements of machine learning into its existing online services, including Google Translate and Inbox, a next-generation interface for Gmail.

Alternatively, you can get the measure of one at Dyson's new "Demo" store in London, which not-so-coincidentally opens its doors today. The first of these interactive spaces debuted in Paris way back in 1999. Over the past couple of years, though, they've come to Tokyo, Jakarta, and now London's shopping-mad Oxford Street. The best way I can describe it is like walking into a fancy infomercial. Products sit on white plinths, illuminated by swish LED spotlights developed by Jake Dyson, son of company frontman James.

I had to comment to balance out the one single negative comment. It's true that there's some problems with the printing but the comment is irrelevant for the book's content. I think that the first volume is a great summary of subjects that junior data scientists must know. Also, I being a great believer in Occam's razor: if you managed to explain (or at least to remind) how does an SVM works in 2 pages instead of 20 pages - then you did a good job. The internet (and the library?) is full of details for further research.

Onstage at the Code Conference this week, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos stressed that Amazon was committing to "intelligent" voice assistant devices in a big way. Bezos said that the company has more than 1,000 people working on the "Alexa and Echo ecosystem," and that what we've seen so far is "just the tip of the iceberg." Google introduced its own Amazon Echo competitor, Google Home, at I/O last month, in addition to its own voice-powered software ecosystem. And in a week and a half, Apple is reportedly going to announce that it's opening up Siri to outside developers (the company is also said to be working on its own Echo-like device). By flicking at the broader "ecosystem" of apps and services that Amazon wants to support through its Echo, Bezos is making explicit what the next stage of the competition for Echo will look like.