Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook is widely expected to launch an app store for chatbots at its developer conference this week. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. What can I help you with Jane?

Computer manufacturer Atos has named its first customer for Bull sequana, a supercomputer design it hopes will reach exaflop levels of performance by 2020. Atos is building the computer for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), it said Tuesday. By targeting 2020 for delivery of an exaflop supercomputer, Atos is entering a race in which China and Japan may already have a head-start. An exaflop is a billion billion floating-point operations per second (flops). That's way more than today's fastest machine can manage: China's Tianhe-2 has a maximum performance of 33.9 petaflops (millions of billions of flops), according to the November 2015 edition of the Top500 supercomputer rankings.

Hong Kong's economy is likely to encounter quite serious challenges in the coming two or three years. A study released by the University of Hong Kong predicts the city's economy will grow 1.5 percent this year. I think the real GDP growth rate may be close to zero, or even fall below zero. The situation in the second half may even be worse. Currently, Hong Kong's economy has four pillars: trade and logistics, tourism, finance and professional services.

We've compiled a list of the hottest events and conferences from the world of Data Science and Machine Learning this year that we think you should know about! Image Processing, Computer Vision and Machine Learning based on Optimization and PDE.(Oslo, Norway) 29th August https://ivlopde2016.wordpress.com/

Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook is widely expected to launch an app store for chatbots at its developer conference this week. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. A chatbot is a computer software program that is able to communicate with humans, using artificial intelligence.

The robots are coming -- to help run your life or sell you stuff -- at an online texting service near you. In coming months, users of Facebook's Messenger app, Microsoft's Skype and Canada's Kik can expect to find new automated assistants offering information and services at a variety of businesses. These messaging "chatbots" are basically software that can conduct human-like conversation and do simple jobs once reserved for people. Google and other companies are reportedly working on similar ideas. In Asia, software butlers are already part of the landscape.

I saw a news article recently about how high frequency trading firms are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their trading performance and profit. Two large companies were mentioned with each having a slightly different approach. This May, Nomura Securities are releasing a new stock trading system, built around analysing and assessing vast price and trading data resources. The system aims to simulate the insights of experienced (human) traders and make predictions based on historical market conditions and the correlation to current asset prices. Nothing particularly new about that, but the difference is they will be using AI tools to enable the system to enhance its price prediction ability as it gains more experience.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.

For two straight quarters, deal activity in artificial intelligence has hit record highs. Dennis Mortensen is one of the biggest winners in all the craze. His startup x.ai is the creator of Amy Ingram, an AI-driven personal assistant that can schedule meetings for you. After testing Amy in beta for two years, Mortensen announced last week 23 million in Series B funding to bring Amy to market. Dennis Mortensen: AI used to be for academia only and decades-long research.

Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?