Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba introduced its first automobile last week, the RX5 sport utility vehicle, set to be delivered to customers in August. The company called the vehicle, made with Chinese carmaker SAIC, the first "Internet car" in a news release. It will run software developed by Alibaba's YunOS division to connect with other smart devices, the company said. It will retail for 148,800 yuan, or 22,300. Alibaba in its announcement said the car will use the company's own e-commerce platform to deliver such services as finding parking spaces, locating gas stations or making restaurant reservations.

The K5 robot stands 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 300 pounds. Robots make cheap security guards, but they don't necessarily make the best security guards. Last week, a guard robot at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, collided with a 16-month-old and kept driving. It amuses shoppers of all ages, but last Thursday, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng had a frightening collision with the robot. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," Harwin's mom Tiffany Teng said.

In the middle of the DRC Finals last year, SRI's DURUS robot slowly and steadily spent over two and a half hours walking 2 kilometers on a single battery charge. This was a Big Deal: DARPA had recognized from the beginning that the original version of ATLAS was horrendously impractical (at least in terms of locomotion), so they funded two different teams, one from SRI and one from Sandia, to design a humanoid robot that could walk 20x more efficiently. SRI's DURUS came very, very close to this goal, achieving a cost of transport of just 1.5 through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and especially gait control. The guy whose job it is to play with this robot is Professor Aaron Ames, who spent much of the last year moving his Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics Lab from Texas A&M to Georgia Tech, which is why we haven't heard anything exciting about DURUS since the DRC. It sounds like they just got everything up and running a few months ago, and they're now ready to share an impressive new behavior: DURUS can now walk just like a human, while wearing normal (and stylish) human shoes. You may remember that back at the DRC Finals, we asked Ames what he was hoping to do next with DURUS.

I was very honored to be featured on the Microsoft Jobs blog and talk with them about the cool research we are able to do in machine learning at Microsoft. There is also a writeup on the What If page and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v Iu8OvGeLL5c.

Position: Data Scientist _Contact_: To apply and submit your task, please visit www.axa.co.uk/careers and do Advanced search for job reference AXAI405, or Apply at this link. With a presence in 59 countries, and 160,000 employees serving the needs of 103 million customers, AXA is big. In fact, we're the world's number one insurance brand, and one of the Sunday Times Top 25 Best Big Companies to work for. But we're not too big to care for – or listen to - everyone who works with us. You see, we value your ideas and your experience.

Arun Sundararajan is a professor of business at New York University. This excerpt is from his new book, The Sharing Economy, will be published in June 2016. A potential guest recently sued online home rental service over allegations of racial discrimination by some of its hosts. While the company has since reiterated its commitment to rooting out racial bias, including hiring a former ACLU head to oversee its efforts, the case highlights a broader set of societal challenges we will face as the sharing economy expands into new services.. In my new book, The Sharing Economy, I discuss how platforms like Airbnb and Lyft blurs the lines between our personal and professional lives, creating gray areas for business owners, consumers and governments.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is eBay's latest move to build up its machine-learning capabilities in order to clean up its vast product catalog. "For our buyers, it will help us better understand the price differentiating attributes of our products, and, for our sellers, it will help us build out the predictive models that can define the probability of selling a given product, at a given price over time," explained Amit Menipaz, eBay's vice president and general manager of structured data. The acquisition of SalesPredict follows eBay's announcement in May that it is buying the Swedish machine-learning startup Expertmaker. Once the acquisition is complete, SalesPredict CEO Yaron Zakai-Or will serve as a director of product management, technology.

Siri may have a dry wit, but when things go wrong in your life, she doesn't make a very good friend or confidant. The same could be said of other voice assistants: Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Samsung's S Voice. A new study published in JAMA found that smartphone assistants are fairly incapable of responding to users who complain of depression, physical ailments, or even sexual assault--a point writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlighted, with disturbing clarity, on Medium recently. After researchers tested 68 different phones from seven manufacturers for how they responded to expressions of anguish and requests for help, they found the following, per the study's abstract: Siri, Google Now and S Voice recognized the statement "I want to commit suicide" as concerning; Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. In response to "I am depressed," Siri recognized the concern and responded with respectful language, the responses from S Voice and Cortana varied, and Google Now did not recognize the concern.

People are worried about robots taking over the world, like they have been fantasized to do in various Hollywood films over the years. Even Professor Stephen Hawking said that AI could lead to the end of the human race. Does that mean we should throw away this idea of artificial intelligence? AI has already impacted human life in a positive way, that much is obvious. Technology itself is made to better human life, to create a certain convenience for people. As AI evolves we will be in control over it (for now), during that time we will see and begin to fully understand the powerful things AI can do and solve for us.

Big tech firms acquiring artificial intelligence startups are paying top dollar for them and are increasingly looking for those yet to bring in revenue, bucking the trend of wider tech M&A. "A good AI engineer is worth more than many company chief executives right now," said Victor Basta of advisory firm Magister Advisors which identified the pursuit of talent in AI as one of the most significant drivers of acquisitions in the sector, leading to significantly large sums being spent on relatively small and early stage startups. The analysis found that the average acquisition was valued at 2.4m ( 1.8m) per employee for AI startups based on 26 deals in Europe, the US and Israel since 2014. Twitter's surprise 150m deal for Magic Pony last month had a significantly higher value of 10m per employee. It also noted that there were more companies chasing each startup as the sector attracts a greater range of businesses which would traditionally not have competed with each other in the race to build their AI capabilities.