Tech giant Apple Inc. has acquired Hyderabad-based machine learning startup Tuplejump as part of efforts to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities. The development was first reported by tech news portal TechCrunch. The startup, which had a dozen employees, was launched by three Indian engineers--Rohit Rai, Satyaprakash Buddhavarappu and Deepak Alur--in 2013. The first two co-founders have joined Apple while Alur is now working with US cloud-tech firm Anaplan. Terms of this deal are not clear.

Sales professionals make critical decisions every day, deciding which prospects to reach out to, what product and service offerings to highlight, and which communication channels will work best. Many salespeople make these decisions based on intuition or follow an organizational playbook. NAVIK SalesAI offers a better alternative by making the buyer central to the process, and applying artificial intelligence to the data. It provides weekly guidance identifying the most promising contacts, specifying which products or services each contact is likely to purchase next and suggesting the most effective communication channel to use. Product recommendations outline the likely reasons motivating a purchase, giving the sales person talking points that resonate with their prospect.

That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Apple acquires another machine learning firm, purchasing India-based Tuplejump and its open-source FiloDB project for analyzing massive amounts of complex data. Researchers at MIT create a machine learning-based system for automatically screening children for speech and language disorders through an accessible mobile app. Facebook launches a new feature, powered by machine learning, that automatically infers when a message suggests a transaction and prompts the recipient to pay.

As a CPA and audit partner, I don't do robots or self-driving cars. But a number of my clients do. They are innovating in many fields. Computers have discovered new drugs for treating cancer. Machines can recognize human faces better than, well, humans.

With a new scientific paper published every 20 seconds, startups and tech veterans alike are racing to apply artificial intelligence to help academics and businesses stay on top the relentless influx of new information. We at Sparrho are testing a new incentive model for researchers to communicate their academic publications to a wider audience. Perhaps a loved one suffers from insomnia and you want to keep up-to-date with the newest research, or you are a blogger or television researcher looking for new themes to cover, or in fact, you just want to know about the latest advances in hydrogen car technology before anybody else. Google your topic of interest, and you'll be greeted by plenty of news articles and popular science blog posts, but original research articles are hard to find. Even if you find them, how will you know which articles are most relevant and, more importantly, trusted by experts?

Colin O'Donnell is the chief innovation officer of Intersection. Cities have always been hubs of technological experimentation, shaped by the people who inhabit them and the tools they use. We can still see the marks, both charming and garish, from technologies of years past -- from old aqueducts to telephone booths to the damage done by cars. The next wave of real-time technologies that will define the next decade are software (rather than hardware) upgrades to the city that will nonetheless transform the way we work, play and live in our physical environments -- our "brick and mortar" cities. And these technologies, each transformative in their own right, when used in combination to develop new products and experiences, will have a multiplying effect on the rate of change we see in urban environments.

Even today, a hacker with a command of artificial intelligence may be able to force a self-driving car to miss a stop sign, or a facial recognition system to believe it's seeing a completely different person in a security setting. Researchers have shown that virtual personal assistants like Siri or Google Now can be tricked into visiting potentially malicious websites by audio that sounds like white noise to humans. To thwart such hackers, Elon Musk's OpenAI and Pennsylvania State University released a new tool this week called "cleverhans," that lets artificial intelligence researchers test how vulnerable their AI is to adversarial examples, or purposefully malicious data meant to confuse the algorithms. Once the vulnerability has been found, a defense to the attack can automatically be applied. The tool is meant to be a "collection of attacks and defenses, along with tutorials on how to use them," according to Nicolas Papernot, co-creator and security researcher at Pennsylvania State University, in an email to Quartz.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts! In this episode of Marketing Nerds, SEJ's Chief Social Media Strategist, Brent Csutoras, was joined by Heidi Young, the principle engineering lead at Oslo, an AI program, to discuss the future of conversational search and how AI could help create a true virtual assistant. Here are a few excerpts from Brent and Heidi's conversation, but be sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything. We very much are in the early stages of it, but I would say what makes today very different from even five years ago, is that technology has kind of been catching up and the market it ready for it. The fact that Google has worked so hard, over the years, to digitize the world's information, organize the world's content, and that Facebook has learned so much about you, and Amazon knows everything that there could be to know about products, you have this ocean of information that's specialized and personalized, all at the same time.

Ticketing sales and commerce platform ReplyBuy has been providing their subscribers the opportunity to receive text messages when tickets become available for their selected team (by literally replying with "buy"). Typically, the user that would reply to the text the fastest would get the ticket. Now, they've upgraded their technology so that people are able to send messages to a ReplyBuy chatbot. The new addition will let fans ask the chatbot for tickets for specific games and events. The bot will then respond with questions like "how many tickets do you want?" and "what's your price range?" We're also firm believers in what the future holds for Artificial Intelligence and concierge-based services.