Over her nearly 60-year life, Barbie has taken on many forms, but she's never been a hologram. Now, though, she is having a truly out-of-body experience, showing up in her first holographic figure, Hello Barbie Hologram. Barbie parent company Mattel unveiled the semi-translucent and chatty AI figure, which lives inside a pink plastic box, on Friday at the New York Toy Fair. SEE ALSO: Please let'Justice League' be as awesome as this RC Batmobile This is far from Barbie's first brush with AI. Mattel introduced Hello Barbie artificial intelligence inside a physical Barbie doll in 2015.

Technology may be advancing rapidly when it comes to autonomous vehicles, but humans still make the cut. At least that's the finding of a new report about safety challenges that highlights the importance of driver behavior. While autonomous vehicles have the potential for tremendous safety benefits, they will be sharing the road with traditional driver-operated cars for many decades, "perhaps forever," according to "Autonomous Vehicles Meet Human Drivers: Traffic Safety Issues for States" released earlier this month by the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit organization representing state highway safety offices. "The research and media attention given to autonomous vehicles often overlooks the safety implications that a mix of driver-operated and autonomous vehicles will bring, " Dr. James Hedlund, a former senior official with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and author of the report, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, ignoring the driver side of the equation may negate many of the expected safety benefits," he added.

A fresh scrape from Glassdoor gives us a good idea about what applicants are asked during a data scientist interview at some of the top companies. Unfortunately for us, almost every company has their interviewees sign NDAs. Since Glassdoor allows anonymity, a few brave souls have given us some fantastic examples of what they were asked during the interview process at top companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. If you find yourself unable to answer some of the questions below, consider checking out a course or a book on the subject. If you'd like to share your answer(s) to any of the questions, leave a comment and I'll add the top ones to the post.

I was sharing my latest Algorithmic Rotoscope image on Facebook and a friend asked me what I meant by training a machine learning model. When you get too close to the fire, you lose your words sometimes. It is why I try to step away and write stories about it -- it helps me find my words and learn to use them in new and interesting ways. Thankfully, I have a partner in crime who understands this stuff and knows how to use her words. I use my blog as a reference for my ideas and thoughts, and I didn't want to lose this one. I'm playing with machine learning so that I can better understand what it does and what it doesn't do.

Staying up to date with rapidly evolving technologies in the ecommerce and marketing industries can be a daunting task. With a slew of new technologies out there, it is also not easy to pinpoint which ones are worth the venture. We analyzed the top 3 most successful technologies impacting the ecommerce industry today. In 2016, total retail sales across the globe reached a whopping $22.049 trillion estimation, up 6 percent from the previous year, according to eMarketer forecasts. EMarketer also predicts that sales will top $27 trillion in 2020, despite annual growth rates slowing over the next few years.

Did you ever think you'd live in a world where the foxiest job title was "Data Scientist," people who build "models" all day? Well, Weird Science has come to pass. This is our new and very exciting reality. Knowledge and experiences are wrapped together for a new set of challenges, from data scientist to developer to marketers. Last year's news that Google was using a new machine learning tool called RankBrain -- used to contribute to its search engine results -- caused a kerfuffle in the SEO world, leaving us wondering just what kind of impact it would have.

That impact will be significant. This year alone at least 1 billion people will be touched in some way by artificial intelligence, which is transforming everything from financial services to transportation, energy, education and retail. In healthcare alone, IBM Watson is engaged in serious efforts to help radiologists identify markers of disease; to help oncologists identify personalized treatments for cancer patients; and to help neuroscientists identify genetic links to diseases like ALS, paving the way for advanced drug discovery.

A group of Silicon Valley roboticists who developed Shakey, a pioneer mobile robot project, gathered last night at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to dedicate the tall, wheeled machine as an IEEE Milestone. Joining the group were other robotics visionaries, IEEE officers and local IEEE section members, and fans of computing history. Shakey, developed at SRI International between 1966 and 1972, was honored as the world's first mobile, intelligent robot. "Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center developed the world's first mobile, intelligent robot, SHAKEY. It could perceive its surroundings, infer implicit facts from explicit ones, create plans, recover from errors in plan execution, and communicate using ordinary English. SHAKEY's software architecture, computer vision, and methods for navigation and planning proved seminal in robotics and in the design of web servers, automobiles, factories, video games, and Mars rovers."

As the Trump administration struggles to determine the future of a controversial executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the futures of international students from those countries hang in the balance. Even though the ban was struck down by a federal court and travel has resumed, the students still face uncertainty, especially since President Trump says he may issue a new version of the executive order. Not only are many indefinitely separated from their families, but their professional opportunities are also at risk. For students who have already achieved success in research or entrepreneurship during their time in the United States, the executive order is particularly troubling. One of the seven countries named in the executive order, Iran has long contributed to American intellectual advancement.

Machine Learning has 2 phases. Typically, model building is performed as a batch process and predictions are done realtime. The model building process is a compute intensive process while the prediction happens in a jiffy. Therefore, performance of an algorithm in Python or R doesn't really affect the turn-around time of the user. Python 1, R 1. Production: The real difference between Python and R comes in being production ready.