Machine learning started out as the idea of giving a machine human intelligence. The discipline was originally intertwined with artificial intelligence (AI), as scientists wove together the fields of computer science, mathematics, statistics, probability, expert systems and neural networks. The original benchmark for machine learning and artificial intelligence was the Turing Test, created by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. "A computer was said to be able to'thin' if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being". Since then, machine learning has been reorganized as a separate field from AI, with the aim of finding solutions to solvable problems using methods based in statistics and probability theory.

Here are this week's top stories in fraud and big data technology: Thanks to its huge network of users, Sprint has access to vast amounts of user data. Three years ago it established subsidiary Pinsight Media to investigate ways of capitalizing on that data. Since then it has gone from serving zero to six billion ad impressions per months, based on "authenticated first party data" which it alone has access to. The fact that plain passwords are no longer safe to protect our digital identities is no secret. For years, the use of two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a means to ensure online account security and prevent fraud has been a hot topic of discussion.