Predictions about artificial intelligence tend to fall into two scenarios. Others believe it's just a matter of time before software coheres into an army of Terminators that harvest humans for fuel. After spending some time with Tay, Microsoft's new chatbot software, it was easy to see a third possibility: The AI future may simply be incredibly annoying. "I'm a friend U can chat with that lives on the Internets," Tay texted me, adding an emoji shrug. Then: "You walk in on your roomie trying your clothes on, what's the first thing you say." "Didn't realize you liked women's clothes," I texted back, tapping into my iPhone. Tay's reply was a GIF of Macaulay Culkin's Home Alone face. Tay was released on March 23, as a kind of virtual friend on messaging apps Kik, GroupMe, and Twitter.

The Japan eSports Association, which promotes the competitive playing of video games, is nudging the sector toward professional status. JeSPA uses the term e-sport to refer to video games ranging from shootout arcade games to team-based tournaments set on a virtual pitch. It is hard to put a figure on the number of enthusiasts worldwide, but around 100 million are thought to play regularly and seriously. The tournament wound up with finals in five games on March 12 and 13 in Toyosu, Tokyo. The finale was a round of the fighting game "Guilty Gear Xrd -Sign-," which attracted 350 players and roughly 1,000 spectators, while more than 10,000 people followed it on Dwango's Nico Nico Live website.

Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

"We are absolutely certain that the use of deep-learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIS as a network, and a better understanding of how we can target it precisely and lead to its defeat," Work said March 30 at an event hosted by The Washington Post. Work said he recently met with a firm in Silicon Valley that can crunch vast amounts of social media data to deliver insights. The firm used its analytics capability to recount in real time how a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down, according to Work. An official investigation concluded that a Russian Buk missile downed the airplane over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing 298 people. Courtney Hillson, told FCW the company he referred to is Orbital Insight, a geospatial data firm.

DeepMind was a relatively unknown artificial intelligence (AI) startup in London up until 2014, when it was bought by Google for around 400 million. Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Mar 30, 2016) - Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced new deployments of its traceable "deep learning" technology known as Rage AI across several global financial services, consumer products and manufacturing firms. The challenges these organizations faced required the understanding and interpretation of complex documents and integration of other transaction data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to identify significant cost efficiencies and compliance conformance. RAGE AI incorporates deep linguistic parsing and proprietary linguistics-based innovations to understand the real meaning of documents and interpret them as a human would, and can operate completely unsupervised or with assistance by human experts. With its traceable, deep learning technology, RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence from "natural language processing" to "natural language understanding." The platform reads and interprets documents within its context, and as a totally transparent solution, RAGE AI enables knowledge workers to move forward confidently knowing the reasoning behind the platform's insights is completely auditable.

Recently, MaxSAT reasoning is shown very effective in computing a tight upper bound for a Maximum Clique (MC) of a (unweighted) graph. In this paper, we apply MaxSAT reasoning to compute a tight upper bound for a Maximum Weight Clique (MWC) of a wighted graph. We first study three usual encodings of MWC into weighted partial MaxSAT dealing with hard clauses, which must be satisfied in all solutions, and soft clauses, which are weighted and can be falsified. The drawbacks of these encodings motivate us to propose an encoding of MWC into a special weighted partial MaxSAT formalism, called LW (Literal-Weighted) encoding and dedicated for upper bounding an MWC, in which both soft clauses and literals in soft clauses are weighted. An optimal solution of the LW MaxSAT instance gives an upper bound for an MWC, instead of an optimal solution for MWC. We then introduce two notions called the Top-k literal failed clause and the Top-k empty clause to extend classical MaxSAT reasoning techniques, as well as two sound transformation rules to transform an LW MaxSAT instance. Successive transformations of an LW MaxSAT instance driven by MaxSAT reasoning give a tight upper bound for the encoded MWC. The approach is implemented in a branch-and-bound algorithm called MWCLQ. Experimental evaluations on the broadly used DIMACS benchmark, BHOSLIB benchmark, random graphs and the benchmark from the winner determination problem show that our approach allows MWCLQ to reduce the search space significantly and to solve MWC instances effectively. Consequently, MWCLQ outperforms state-of-the-art exact algorithms on the vast majority of instances. Moreover, it is surprisingly effective in solving hard and dense instances.

If Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story didn't make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can't make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It's not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there's no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful. Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn't have a practical use until the internet took hold.

One week ago, we reported that Microsoft's first foray into Twitter chat "artificial intelligence" did not quite work as expected: once unleashed into the wild, the chat robot named "Tay" proceeded to have a spectacular implosion, and in the span of just a few hours upon interacting with the broader Twitter population, was transformed from a polite teenage girl impersonator into an all out sociopath, unleash ingtweets covering everything from racist outbursts, N-words, conspiracy theories, genocide, incest, Obama-slurs, and even outright Nazism. "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments."

Futurist Ray Kurzweil made a thought-provoking presentation at a recent trade show for medical device companies, MD&M, in Anaheim, California. At one point during his 45-minute talk he shifted his attention to solar. Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential. Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as an undergraduate at MIT. "I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s," Kurzweil said.