Carol E. Reiley is the co-founder and president of Drive.ai. She previously founded Tinkerbelle Laboratories. During my Ph.D. studies, I developed a voice-activated human-robot interface for a surgical robotic system using Microsoft's speech recognition API. But, because the API had been built mainly by 20-30-year-old men, it did not recognize my voice. I had to lower my pitch in order for it to work.

Facebook has acquired a facial image analysis firm FacioMetrics as it tries to give users new features to add special effects to photos and videos. The technology developed by the startup also includes capabilities for face tracking and recognizing emotions, which could potentially open up other applications for Facebook. The financial terms of the acquisition of FacioMetrics, a startup that was spun off from Carnegie Mellon University, were not disclosed. Facebook will discontinue the products, which are no longer available on app stores.The FacioMetrics website now only has a message about the acquisition. "How people share and communicate is changing and things like masks and other effects allow people to express themselves in fun and creative ways," a Facebook spokesman wrote in an email Wednesday.

Apps and sites that can be used to hire people for individual tasks like picking up groceries or designing a new logo have taken off in recent years, promising a more efficient and fairer marketplace for employment. However, a new study out of Northeastern University in Boston suggests that racial and sexual discrimination may be common on two popular "gig economy" platforms. Researchers led by Christo Wilson, an assistant professor at Northeastern, and Ancsa Hannák, a PhD student, examined TaskRabbit, a platform for hiring people to run errands, and Fiverr, a marketplace for creative services. On both, they found evidence of bias along racial and gender lines. And it's troubling because the gig economy promised to be not only more efficient and flexible, but also less biased--since algorithms do the work of connecting people.

Not in my lifetime, says Google's cloud chief Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned us once again that using artificial intelligence and computers will be the last thing we will do. Because it will destroy us. According to him, the world could face an apocalypse similar to the one shown in movies like The Matrix where robots take over humans. While speaking in Cambridge in October, Hawking said that robots can become more intelligent than us humans and stop being subservient to us. "I believe there is no deep difference between what can be achieved by a biological brain and what can be achieved by a computer. It therefore follows that computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence – and exceed it."

Yes, artificial technology is rapidly improving -- and true, AI will invade the legal business before you know it -- but futuristic AI-infused robot lawyers aren't going to replace legal pros anytime soon. AI-based tools and technologies created and customized for legal work are coming for sure, though. AI-enabled software can use pattern recognition and extreme machine learning algorithms to help legal pros work faster. Their capability digest vast amounts of information and interpret it can help you work smarter, too. The time to start thinking about the first wave of AI legal tools is now.

I declare 2016 to be The Year of The Smart Data and Machine Learning! Above is a graphical representation of the Google alerts as such appear in "real-time" for the BigData keywords and Machine Learning keyword (in verity of permutations, i.e. case sensitivity, etc.). In addition to that this graph shows the liner regression of both keyword alerts respectively. While BigData keyword spikes thought a year which I was able to correlate to variety of BigData conferences around the world, Machine Learning hype starts to hit closer to the end of 2015 into 2016 clearly showing the level of interest among consumers as well as the producers of the technology. Great understanding and input is usually well captured in the community of analysts who attempt to not only look at the technology available and emerging, but also the interest in such among the consumer/business community.

Infor has enhanced its Infor EzRMS with an improved forecasting engines. The revenue management solution is designed to maximise income within the hospitality vertical. Its aim is to sell the right product to the right customer at the best time in the appropriate place. The new update enhances the ability for hoteliers to discover who, when and where those ideal moments are. The update enhances the core solution with improved algorithms using dynamic trend modelling and machine learning techniques.

When you think of Facebook, you think of data, but not so much technology. Get ready for an in-depth preview of how Facebook is and is further planning to use artificial intelligence and other key technologies that they see as critical to their future. "Facebook's long-term roadmap is focused on building foundational technologies in three areas: connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality," wrote Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer. "We believe that major research and engineering breakthroughs in each of these areas will help us make more progress toward opening the world to everyone over the next decade." Tying all of these crucial technology projects together is AI.

While his feet may have been in Sydney, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's head was firmly in the clouds. In Australia for a Microsoft Developers conference, Nadella laid out his main theories for the digital future: Mobile-first and cloud-first. SEE ALSO: Inside Microsoft's plan to bring 3D to everyone "We have a distinctive point of view when we say'mobile first,'" he said. With echoes of Mark Zuckerberg's bot evangelism at April's F8, and Nadella's own remarks at the Microsoft's annual developers conference in March, it was a bot-heavy message sent Wednesday. To help build'em, Nadella announced the launch of the Azure Bot Service -- a new public cloud-based bot builder -- that will give everyone access to automated systems that understand conversational language.