This week I attended an "Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roundtable" of leading scientists, entrepreneurs and venture investors. As the discussion focused mainly on basic statistical techniques, I left feeling unfulfilled. My friend, Matt Turck, recently wrote that "just about every major tech company is working very actively on AI," which also means that every startup hungry for capital is purchasing a dot'ai' domain name. As the lines blur between what is and what really isn't, I feel it necessary to provide readers with a quick lens of how to view intelligent agents for mechatronics. For 65 years, The Turing Test remained unsolvable until a computer program called "Eugene Goostman" conquered it in 2014.

Security researchers have discovered an unusual Android vulnerability that could affect nearly 40 per cent of users. It can expose users to malware, by allowing cyber criminals to hijack a phone's screen. Google is aware of the threats and says it will address the problem in Android O, the next version of the company's mobile operating system. Unfortunately, that's expected to launch later this year, and history suggests it will only end up rolling out to devices in 2018. Even then, there's no guarantee that a handset running Marshmallow will be able to upgrade to O.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella opens the US technology titan's annual Build Conference in Seattle on May 10, 2017. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that "bots are the new apps" at the Microsoft Build developer conference in March 2016. Little over a year later, at the latest annual Build taking place this week in Seattle, Microsoft renewed its commitment to bots, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and built around Nadella's vision of conversation as a platform. Chat bots are meant to model human conversation, some for social reasons, others for business and productivity purposes. Microsoft's Nadella rallies coders to prevent dystopian future Microsoft announced an expanded set of developer tools for the Bot Framework that was unveiled last year, announcing channels at Build that will let developers make use of bots through the Cortana personal assistant, Bing search engine and Skype for Business.

Shaokang Wang and his startup, Infervision, build algorithms that read X-ray images and identify early signs of lung cancer. The company's technology, Wang says, is already running inside four of the largest hospitals in China. Two are merely running tests, but according to Wang, the two others--Shanghai Changzheng and Tongji, both in Shanghai--are installing the technology across their operations. "It's installed on every doctor's machine," he says. To what extent these doctors are actually using the technology is another question.

Research into artificial intelligence is going gangbusters, and the frenetic pace won't let up for about five years--after which the industry will concentrate around a handful of core technologies and leaders, the head of Intel's new AI division predicts. Intel is keen to be among them. In March, it formed an Artificial Intelligence Products Group headed by Naveen Rao. He previously was CEO of Nervana Systems, a deep-learning startup Intel acquired in 2016. Rao sees the industry moving at breakneck speed.

If you follow China's bold ambition to join the great space powers, it will eventually lead you here, to the neglected eastern edge of steamy Hainan island, in a speck of a village that doesn't appear on most maps. Rocket replicas and signs for Wi-Fi welcome visitors past coconut trees and peppers grown from seeds bred in space. Guide maps show what this hamlet of about 50 residents might become, though the blacktop still looks fresh and most of the noise comes from the chicken coop. Local officials envision Haosheng as the start of a thriving tourist destination tied to nearby Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, much in the way Florida's Space Coast draws visitors interested in Cape Canaveral. China's newest spaceport opened for tours last year and just sent the country's first cargo spacecraft into orbit.

Baidu President Zhang Yaqin said, "AI could mean China leading the world" at the GMIC Beijing tech conference that had been opened with physicist Stephen Hawking's portentous predictions for the technology. "The first major advantage is the quantity of data China has for AI to use," said Zhang participating in the Leadership in the Artificial Intelligence Era panel. "The second advantage for AI innovation is the same as for any technology – talent… If you look back over the last ten years, the quantity of Chinese AI researchers, whether in China or overseas, has begun to exceed that of other countries, passing the US in 2014. So the overall quantity is already large and we're already seeing a series of world-class AI applications, including at Baidu. We're seeing a merging of these two advantages – big data and high-quality talent which, in the field of AI, put China in such a good position globally."

The world's biggest Facebook page for atheists has been repeatedly removed. The people behind the "Atheist Republic" page say that it has been taken down at least three after what appears to be a co-ordinated campaign. Activists who oppose the page appear to be reporting it so that it will be automatically taken down – leaving it invisible and unable to post. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The Sims is set to launch on Android and iOS "soon". EA has teased a smartphone version of the classic game, called The Sims Mobile, which is expected to stay true to the PC original that first came out 17 years ago. The Sims Mobile has already launched in Brazil, and will arrive in more markets in the near future. It will be free to play. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

In last week's post I explored whether machine learning models can be applied to predict flu deaths from the 2013 outbreak of influenza A H7N9 in China. There, I compared random forests, elastic-net regularized generalized linear models, k-nearest neighbors, penalized discriminant analysis, stabilized linear discriminant analysis, nearest shrunken centroids, single C5.0 tree and partial least squares. Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is a faster and improved implementation of gradient boosting for supervised learning and has recently been very successfully applied in Kaggle competitions. Because I've heard XGBoost's praise being sung everywhere lately, I wanted to get my feet wet with it too. So this week I want to compare the prediction success of gradient boosting with the same dataset.