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.

Save hundreds on over 60 hours of hands-on training for the next frontier of computer science.

Artificial Intelligence has been heralded as a game changer in the drive toward the intelligent enterprise. While AI and machine learning has been around for more than five decades, it's today's increasingly interconnected world and the continuing explosion of data that is driving an increase of applications powered by AI. AI promises to deliver exciting opportunities to IT as well as the business world, and many believe the reality is not far off. According to a recent report by Research and Markets, the AI market is estimated to grow from 419.7m ( 280m) in 2014 to 5.05bn ( 3.5bn) by 2020, at a CAGR of 53.65 per cent from 2015 to 2020. Major factors driving growth include diversified application areas of AI, improved productivity, and increased levels of customer satisfaction.

Bayesian Networks are a tool of new application to the question of risks, in particular for modeling operational risk. Its use for measuring operational risk in the financial sector has channeled large efforts in developing new methods that measure this type of risk which allow improving the internal gestation of the operational processes. Applying Bayesian Networks for modeling operational risk presents the opportunity to incorporate elements of qualitative analysis as well as the opinion of experts in the process of selecting interest variables, defining the structure of the model through its dependencies of causality, such as the specification of a priori distributions and conditional probabilities of each node. It has been found that Bayesian models that incorporate data as well as expert judgment (especially about causality) work better than any other method applicable in the field.

Tor is one of the world's most used anonymity networks, and offers a safe haven for internet users in oppressive regimes as well as criminals operating in cyberspace. The development of Tor was partly founded by the US government to help dissidents in countries with extreme internet censorship. The FBI however allegedly harassed a Tor developer after it started being used for criminal activities. Tor is one of the most used ways for users to hide their identity online. However, the Tor network can be compromised because of vulnerabilities in the network.

Back in December of 2015, Beijing city government issued its first red alert to signal that air pollutant levels were significant enough to cause risk to human health. As part of active red alert protocols, the city demands that automobile usage be reduced by 50%, and that heavy-load vehicles like garbage trucks and semis be banned from the road. This, in turn, slows local business, industry, and commerce to a near grinding halt. Flight cancellations are another common and undesirable side effect of these red alert transportation restrictions. Even worse still, however, are the ways in which this level of air pollution is affecting human health throughout Beijing and China at-large.

Tech companies are planning a burst of hiring over the next three years, according to a survey of technology company chief executive officers that was conducted by KPMG. Workforces at technology companies are expected to increase by at least 6 percent, the poll of CEOs found. High-tech firms also intend to bolster automation and machine learning in an array of functions, the KPMG survey of 138 tech CEOs determined. Technology executives also intend to find ways to meld additional workers with improved automation. "Tech CEOs see the benefits of digital labor augmenting workforce capabilities," said Gary Matuszak, global and U.S. chair of KPMG's Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice.