Facebook is well known for its early and increasing use of artificial intelligence. The social media site uses AI to pinpoint its billion-plus users' individual interests and tailor content accordingly by automatically scanning their newsfeeds, identifying people in photos and targeting them with precision ads. And now behind the scenes the social network's AI researchers are trying to take this technology to the next level--from pure data-crunching logic to a nuanced form of "common sense" rivaling that of humans. AI already lets machines do things like recognize faces and act as virtual assistants that can track down info on the Web for smartphone users. But to perform even these basic tasks the underlying learning algorithms rely on computer programs written by humans to feed them massive amounts of training data, a process known as machine learning.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Save eBay? By The Street For eBay (EBAY), artificial intelligence could prove to be its salvation. The San Jose, Calif.-based e-commerce giant, which has been working to transform itself after spinning off PayPal Holdings (PYPL) last year, could reap some huge benefits if it can find out a way to effectively use AI, according to analysts. At the Code Conference earlier this month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed that the company started getting very serious about using artificial intelligence last year, noting that e-commerce is essentially a data business and that AI may be more important for eBay than its peers due to the "breadth of its inventory." Wenig further explained that eBay plans to formulate a strategy focused on using data to predict what consumers might want and offering a wide selection of products.

Google is expanding its efforts in Artificial intelligence with a new project to teach machines what it terms "common sense". The technology giant has launched a new European research centre dedicated to advancing AI technology. Based in Zurich, the team will focus on three areas – machine learning, natural language understanding and computer perception. Emmanuel Mogenet, who will head the unit, said much of the research would be on teaching machines common sense. There was, he said, "no limit on how big I grow the team We are very ambitious in terms of growth. The only limiting factor will be talent," he told journalists gathered in Zurich to hear more about Google's AI plans.

Security and privacy expert Matthew Green reassures us, "Your iPhone is not going to kill you." But in his recent explanation of how Apple's differential privacy approach will send an obscured subset of our private activities to Apple, he explains that some studies demonstrate serious consequences to restricting privacy too much when collecting data related to medical research. Apple proposes initially to gather data in iOS 10 from typing to improve emoji substitution and predictive word suggestions for previously unrecognized words, and from deep links within apps (non-private internal destinations) to improve Spotlight search results. In macOS Sierra, it will use data to improve autocorrect. And in both, it will watch which Lookup Hints are selected in Notes to provide better help.

Facebook has developed an engine that will enable it to better understand the context of your posts. Called DeepText, it utilizes deep neural network architecture in order to understand the text being shared. The social networking company claims that DeepText is able to understand "with near-human accuracy" the content of several thousand posts per second across 20 languages. This technology was built on ideas developed around deep learning by Ronan Collobert and Yann LeCun from Facebook's AI Research Group. Although introduced today, DeepText is already being tested across some Facebook properties, such as Messenger.

Somewhere in the not so distance future, computers could help doctors diagnose diseases much more quickly than they can today. In fact, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have been working on a way to train artificial intelligence (AI) to read and interpret pathology images that doctors use to look for signs of cancer. Andrew Beck from BIDMC explains that the "method is based on deep learning." It is the method commonly used to train AI to recognize images, speech patterns, and objects. During a demonstration at the annual International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging, they were able to show how effective their training was.

Soon you could be chatting with your computer about the morning news. An AI has learned to read and answer questions about a news article with unprecedented accuracy. Creating AI systems that can learn in the background from humanity's existing stores of information is one of the big goals of computer science. "Computers don't have the kind of general knowledge and common sense of how the world works [from reading] about things in novels or watch[ing] sitcoms," says Chris Manning at Stanford University. To get a step closer to this, last year, Google's DeepMind team used articles from the Daily Mail website and CNN to help train an algorithm to read and understand a short story.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Consider a toddler navigating her day, bombarded by a kaleidoscope of experiences. How does her mind discover what's normal happenstance and begin building a model of the world? How does she recognize unusual events and incorporate them into her worldview? How does she understand new concepts, often from just a single example?