Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Messenger Platform at the F8 summit in San Francisco last year. This year he's expected to announce a "chat bot" store on Messenger. That is the question on many lips ahead of Facebook's annual software developer conference next week in San Francisco. Analysts expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open up Messenger's platform to "chatbots" and launch an online store for them. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Facebook will help software developers build "chatbots."

WIRED Health 2016 takes place on 29 April in London. IBM's Watson supercomputer is perhaps best known for winning the gameshow Jeopardy, but its expertise is now being applied to healthcare Kyu Rhee will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector. You might know IBM's Watson best for its victory on US game show Jeopardy!, or perhaps for its cookery prowess, or even the campaign to elect it to the US presidency. But IBM hopes that its supercomputer can also change the way doctors diagnose their patients, putting vast quantities of data at a physician's fingertips.

The Japanese automaker already has a research lab in the Silicon Valley technology hub of Palo Alto, where it works with Stanford University, and another in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it collaborates with MIT. Its new facility near the University of Michigan will have a staff of about 50 employees. The world's top-selling automaker announced in November that it would invest 1 billion in research and development over the next five years in artificial intelligence technologies, which are critical to the computer brains of self-driving cars. Toyota's investment in R&D comes as competition in the fast-moving field of autonomous vehicles expands beyond carmakers in Asia, Europe and the United States to non-traditional sources such as Alphabet's Google and Apple. The new Ann Arbor facility will focus primarily on fully autonomous driving, in which the car takes full control, the company said.

Welcome to another edition of In the Loop, the Los Angeles Times' theme park newsletter. I'm Funland theme park blogger Brady MacDonald, and this week, we drop in on the Wizarding World grand opening, taste-test Disney's Food and Wine Festival, bid farewell to the last-remaining Back to the Future ride and marvel at Phantasialand's visually stunning new coaster. Times columnist Mary McNamara writes that Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood is the place where "magic comes to life, or as close as it gets." For those who have never been on the world's best dark ride, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey turns the traditional dark ride experience on its head by placing riders on the end of a unique robotic arm. The often-overlooked Flight of the Hippogriff at Wizarding World is a short but fun ride that's perfect for young kids eager to climb aboard their first roller coaster.

TROISDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's Deutsche Post is testing robots that could help postal workers cope with increasing numbers of parcels on their delivery rounds, a company manager said on Thursday. The volume of parcels being delivered by Deutsche Post in Germany is rising steadily as more and more Germans buy goods online from retailers such as Amazon.com That is making up for declining letter volumes, but posing problems due to the larger size of items involved. "Robots could be used in deliveries in three to five years' time," Clemens Beckmann, head of innovation at the group's parcel and letter division, said in an interview with Reuters. The robots, which look like a table on wheels on which goods can be placed, would follow delivery workers, helping them to transport and carry heavy parcels. If the postie stops walking, the robot stops too, and it only starts again when they move on.

Log in Sign up p Discover and save creative ideas p Discover even br more ideas Just a few br more details... p Continue p Creating an account means you're okay with … The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google's Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. NVIDIA proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers. When Microsoft's Tay, the artificially intelligent bot, was taught to be a racist Holocaust-denier by the online masses, traditional publishers got a … Humans have a long and storied history of freaking out over the possible effects of our technologies. Long ago, Plato worried that writing would hurt people's memories and "implant forgetfulness in their souls." More recently, Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein's monster warned us against playing … A brief and broken reappearance.

Loyalty can be a tough metric to master. It can also make or break your business. Once you can accurately calculate customer acquisition costs and lifetime value in a reliable way, you're an investment away from achieving scale. In a modern marketing ecosystem with 1-1 engagement becoming the rule rather than exception, the old "buy ten get one free" punch cards of yore won't cut it. Grubhub CMO Barbara Martin Coppola explained earlier this week at VentureBeat's Mobile Summit that anticipating your customers' next steps by developing a real-time feedback loop was critical to sustaining growth in mobile.

If its first quarter is anything to go by, 2016 may be shaping up historically as the 1491 of space discovery. The month preceding Valentine's Day alone provided what would once have been a year's worth of cosmic news. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took one giant leap toward a new Age of Discovery by relaunching and landing a rocket that had already made a round-trip journey through the stratosphere – a revolutionary moment in private space exploration. A pair of researchers kicked off a frenzied planet hunt by demonstrating that a massive, heretofore undetected planet could be lurking on the outer edge of our solar system. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested that unforeseen effects of rapid scientific progress might, paradoxically, cause the extinction of life on Earth in the next thousand years or so, adding, "By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." And scientists announced they'd detected gravitational waves, evidence of a billion-year-old collision between black holes, thus confirming the final and most obscure principle of Einstein's theory of relativity – and opening a window that may soon offer a glimpse of the universe's very creation.

Last week, 42-year-old Ricky Ma made headlines for his creation of a life- sized robot he called Mark 1, which he modeled after Scarlett Johansson. The robot, which the Hong Kong designer dedicated 18 months of his life to completing, was an easy sell to the viral internet. The story was titillating enough: a grown man fulfilling his childhood dream, an inventor spending thousands of dollars and teaching himself how to use 3D printing software to essentially create a bot that smiles when you tell it that it's beautiful. And the robotic re-creation of Johansson is uncanny and compelling; doll-like, it approaches the look of a flesh-and-blood woman, yet its empty eyes and blank synthetic face are an insistent remind that Mark 1 is not. Mark 1 is ostensibly for recreational use.

A new eGames international gaming tournament will make its debut in Rio during this summer's Olympic Games. The event, launched as part of this week's London Games Festival, offers medals and national pride rather than cash prizes for the winners. The competition, backed by the UK government, will be run by the new International eGames Committee (IEGC). Britain, Canada, Brazil and the USA are the only confirmed entrants so far with more expected to follow. In Olympic years, both summer and winter, the eGames will take place in the host cities - with future tournaments planned for Pyeongchang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2020.