Technology consultant and software developer Prakelt has announced that its new chatbot, Feersum Engine, is ready to start talking using WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other established messaging platforms to interact with end users in a way that feels familiar and comfortable. Feersum Engine is a chatbot that can engage people in conversation using natural language processing and machine learning. Tipped for exponential growth, chatbots and conversational interfaces are already being adopted by many banks and financial services around the world, and their applications are becoming more varied as designers better understand the technology. Streamlining interaction Locally-built Feersum Engine brings artificial intelligence and conversational interaction to large audiences for customer support, brand marketing or public service outreach. One use case for Feersum Engine, for example, is to cut down the number of simple to answer requests that overwhelm support and service agents, and is claimed to be its flexible enough to work in any environment from product support to government healthcare initiatives.

Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, yielding state-of-the-art results in fields such as image recognition and speech processing. More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual natural language signals, again with very promising results. This tutorial surveys neural network models from the perspective of natural language processing research, in an attempt to bring natural-language researchers up to speed with the neural techniques. The tutorial covers input encoding for natural language tasks, feed-forward networks, convolutional networks, recurrent networks and recursive networks, as well as the computation graph abstraction for automatic gradient computation.

An autonomous race car called'DevBot #1', has made its debut on a street track at the Formula E Marrakech ePrix. The battery-powered prototype is being tested ahead of Roborace – a proposed race series where autonomous vehicles will compete on circuits in cities around the world. The car completed a successful 30-minute test in the Moroccan city, which its creators describe as'the most exciting space in the world right now.' An autonomous race car called'DevBot #1', has made its debut on a street track at the Formula E Marrakech ePrix Ten teams, each with two driverless cars, will compete in one-hour races over the full championship season. All the teams will have the same cars, but will create their own real-time computing algorithms and AI technologies.

That's how Hassan Yakub, al-Shabab's most senior leader in Somalia's Galgaduud region, responded when I requested that we use a drone to film his fighters at one of the armed group's training camps. Over the past few years, drone strikes have killed dozens of al-Shabab fighters, including the group's former leader and at least 10 of its senior commanders. The last drone hit to target the al-Qaeda-linked group's leaders happened just a month ago, in the East African country's Lower Juba region. Al-Shabab fighters have been trained to hide from drones or, if the unmanned aircraft are low enough, to shoot them down. Our cameraman was also not enthusiastic about taking a drone to an area controlled by al-Shabab.

The BBC is launching 11 new language services and one of them is English-based Pidgin, which is one of the most widely spoken languages across West Africa, even though it is not officially recognised. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca. Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate. Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed. It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

Facebook's Connectivity Lab today released its high-resolution population maps for Malawi, South Africa, Ghana, Haiti and Sri Lanka, with the promise to make more datasets available over the coming months. The population maps are a joint effort between the Facebook Connectivity Lab, Columbia University and the World Bank, though Facebook is interested in the project as part of its effort to launch wireless communication services in rural regions around the globe. Facebook and friends used software to identify buildings in commercially available satellite images, and then estimated population using census data and a few other surveys and programs. Convolutional neural networks powered a model capable of identifying individual buildings in images from across the world. "There has been a lot of work recently on neural networks that can recognize individual buildings with very high accuracy, but these models are finely tuned on the local characteristics of the region where they are trained," the Connectivity Lab's Tobias Tiecke writes. "We found that these models do not perform well at a global scale with realistic amounts of training data.

Behavioural change is a very tricky thing. We humans are so fickle. We see a bright shiny wearable device that can track our every move and we think it's our "silver bullet", a "ticket" to achieving our health and fitness dreams. Only for guilt to set in, as after a short time, the wearable device winds up in our top drawer. We knew the fitness data was great, but we really didn't know what to do with it. The truth is, behaviour change requires much more than data. Many programs have realized the magnitude of the problem and created incentive programs to reward people for being active, so they get a small pay-off on the road to achieving fitness. But in spite of these rewards, the drop-out rate remains problematic.

At the recent Spark & Machine Learning Meetup in Brussels, Koen Dejonghe of Eurocontrol delivered a lightning talk titled "Simulation and processing of data streams in telecommunications." Specifically, Koen discussed the development of a prototype for processing of data coming from cell towers, executed for a telco operator in the Middle East--with the added difficulty that the customer could not provide real data. In the end, Koen developed a data generator in Scala/Akka, a data processor with Spark Streaming, and a visualization front-end with Node.js.

Today, businesses need to be able to predict demand and trends to stay in line with any sudden market changes and economy swings. This is exactly where forecasting tools, powered by Data Science, come into play, enabling organizations to successfully deal with strategic and capacity planning. Smart forecasting techniques can be used to reduce any possible risks and assist in making well-informed decisions. One of our customers, an enterprise from the Middle East, needed to predict their market demand for the upcoming twelve weeks. They required a market forecast to help them set their short-term objectives, such as production strategy, as well as assist in capacity planning and price control.

An Australian man acquitted of murder last month after his Tinder date plummeted off a balcony to her death faced new criticism after he acknowledged in a TV interview that the woman had screamed "no" a reported 33 times before she fell. "Yeah, she was certainly trying to make a lot of noise," Gable Tostee commented in the interview, which aired on the Nine Network's "60 Minutes." Critics also lashed out after The Courier Mail claimed Tostee was paid a six-figure sum for the interview. A senior detective called it "disgusting". The detective continued, "There's a lot of anger among police about this. Of course we respect the court's decision to find him not guilty but for him to now do a paid interview after everything this poor girl's family has been through, is horrific."