A Microsoft executive said Friday that the company was "deeply sorry" for the "unintended offensive and hurtful" tweets the company's Tay chatbot delivered earlier this week. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," Peter Lee, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft Research, wrote in a blog post. While that echoes the message that Microsoft delivered earlier, Lee attempted to show how Tay wasn't simply unleashed onto the Internet without preparation. Tay was the outgrowth of a similar Microsoft chatbot known as XiaoIce, which is already "delighting" 40 million people in China, Lee explained. "The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment?" Lee wrote.

AI as management assistant: The artificial intelligence program AlphaGo got a lot of attention for beating 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol four out of five games last week. The significance of this achievement is rooted in the extraordinary number of possible moves in Go: 2.08168199382 … 10170, reportedly more than the number of atoms in the universe. That's too many possibilities for brute computing force to handle (which is how IBM's Deep Blue beat chess master Garry Kasparov 20 years ago). Yet AlphaGo, created by Google DeepMind, formerly British AI company DeepMind Technologies, mastered the 2,500-year-old board game on its own in a matter of months. "It started by studying a database of about 100,000 human matches, and then continued by playing against itself millions of times," reported science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel at NPR. Go bragging rights are nice for Google, but what does AlphaGo's victory mean for management?

Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated board game, but occasionally, they get confused by something as simple as a name. Due to the nature of certain computer systems, some names will bring up error messages or even crash websites, potentially blocking users from entering important information. Names may just be too long for particular online forms to bear, or for people with the last name'Null,' the problem lies in the language of programming. Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated game, but sometimes, they get confused by something as simple as a name. People with the last name'Null,' have grown accustomed to the difficulties presented by the word.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your shapeshifting Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. HEBI Robotics, who we like because they make snake robots that also work as legs for non-snake robots, have just released a new modular robot actuator that's geared towards general-purpose robotics and looks pretty awesome: This series of powerful robot module allow engineers, researchers, and industrial integrators to quickly and easily create world-class custom robots of any configuration. These actuators are packed with sensors that enable controllable position, velocity, and sensitive torque control as well as three axis inertial measurement.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997 AMC Sun. Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 EPIX Wed. 10 p.m., Thur. The X-Files: Fight the Future 1998 IFC Thur. Hard to Kill 1990 Sundance Mon. 8 p.m., Tue. A scientist gives his bodyguard superhuman powers in order to fight racists. A lawyer unwittingly becomes friends with an unstable woman who has a criminal history. A successful businesswoman puts her family, career and life on the line to satisfy her addiction to sex. With his father trapped in the wreckage of their spacecraft, a youth treks across Earth's now-hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon and signal for help. In the future a cutting-edge android in the form of a boy embarks on a journey to discover his true nature. An 11-year-old boy experiences the worst day of his young life but soon learns that he's not alone when other members of his family encounter their own calamities. A struggling writer falls in love with a stenographer while trying to finish his new novel in 30 days.

A man walks at the Samsung Electronics' headquarters in Seoul January 7, 2015. Samsung wants to use some of its US 61 billion (RM246 billion) in cash and equivalents to help it morph into more of a software-driven company, executive vice president Rhee In Jong said in an interview. The South Korean consumer-electronics giant also is spending more to develop its own services because the global market for gadgets is saturated and can't be counted on for significant revenue growth, he said. "We are actively looking for M&A targets of all sorts in the software area," said Rhee, who runs the mobile division's research-and-development business. "We are open to all possibilities, including artificial intelligence. Intelligence is no longer an option -- it is a must."

Xiaomi started making smart home gadgets over two years ago. And now for the first time these are heading to markets outside China. Starbucks hired its new chief technology officer, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, just four months ago. While she's new to the coffee chain, she already has … The lifecycle of a new gadget is relatively predictable: When it's brand new, only early adopters are interested. The Alta is Fitbit's best-looking tracker yet, but it doesn't do everything its predecessors can p b The good: /b Attractive; Comfortable to wear; Easy to change straps; Good battery life p b The bad: /b No heart rate monitor; Doesn't measure stair-climbing; Fickle touch screen p b Who should buy: /b Those who want an … IoT described so my grandmother can understand… p If you're reading this, then you probably already know IoT stands for The Internet of Things.

She joined as senior reporter in April 2014 having previously worked as assistant editor at Government Computing. This week saw an artificial intelligence system built by Google-owned AI company DeepMind called'AlphaGo' beat South Korean champion Lee Sedol at the fiendishly complex game'Go'. Sedol won just one game to AlphaGo's four across a five-match series. The success has been touted as a milestone in AI development due to Go's complexity: it managed to win at a game where there are more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe. DeepMind's technique differs from using traditional'brute force' computing power to win. Its deep learning technology allows it to work out general rules from large quantities of data.

Last week, machine learning took a big leap forward when Google's AlphaGo, a machine algorithm, beat the world champion, Lee Sedol, in the game Go. If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. The partnership will provide students within the university's Department of Computing Science the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of IBM's … A new study reveals that voice assistant AIs, like Siri and Cortana, might be clever, but they lack fundamental empathy at their core. Google has entered into the machine learning market with the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning. "Extraordinary" merger of machine intelligence and cloud economics, is changing business operations and society, says Leading Edge Forum.

It may be time to add'novelist' to the list of professions under threat from super-smart computer software, because a short story authored by artificial intelligence has made it through to the latter stages of a literary competition in Japan. The AI software isn't self-aware enough to think up and submit its own work though (not yet, anyway) – the short-form novel was written with the help of a team of researchers from the Future University Hakodate in Japan. Human beings selected certain words and phrases to be used, and set up an overall framework for the story, before letting the software come up with the text itself. One of two submissions from the university made it through the first round of the Nikkei Shinichi Hoshi Literary Award ceremony – perhaps the entry's title, which translates as The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, should have been enough to tip the judges off – but the competition is unique in that it openly accepts entries from non-human writers (Shinichi Hoshi himself was a science-fiction author). Of 1,450 or so novels accepted this year, 11 were written with the involvement of AI programs, the Japan News reports.