'Chatbots are the new apps," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. He was not the first senior tech exec to make this claim. "Threads are the new apps," suggested Facebook's head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Nadella and Marcus see chatbots – computer programs that you interact with by "chatting", for example in threads in messaging apps – as an important new human/machine interface. Both of their companies have launched tools to help developers create these bots, and between April and September, more than 30,000 were made for Facebook Messenger alone. The shopping and breaking news bots in Messenger's ancestors are chatbots such as AI psychotherapist Eliza from the mid-1960s and Parry, a bot mimicking a human with paranoid schizophrenia, in the early 1970s. Since 1991, the chatbot equivalent of the Olympics has been the annual Loebner prize, which challenges bots ...

When Sebastian Thrun started working on self-driving cars at Google in 2007, few people outside of the company took him seriously. "I can tell you very senior CEOs of major American car companies would shake my hand and turn away because I wasn't worth talking to," said Thrun, now the co-founder and CEO of online higher education startup Udacity, in an interview with Recode earlier this week. A little less than a decade later, dozens of self-driving startups have cropped up while automakers around the world clamor, wallet in hand, to secure their place in the fast-moving world of fully automated transportation. And these companies are hungry for talent and skill sets many don't have. "Uber has just bought a half-a-year-old company [Otto] with 70 employees for almost 700 million," Thrun said.

If you've watched movies like Iron Man, featuring virtual assistants, like JARVIS, which you can just have a conversation with and control your home, you probably think that such virtual assistants belong in the realm of science fiction. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook set a personal challenge to create a JARVIS style assistant for his own home. "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man." He may be closer to his goal, as he may be giving a demo something this month. For those that don't have an army of engineers to help them, what can be done today?

NOTE: Part 1 of 2: The following is an excerpt from Thomas International's white paper on Cognitive Fit. It can be found here: http://campaigns.thomasus.com/cognitive/ Employees with strong cognitive ability are a competitive advantage to an organization-- particularly when they are in roles that require quick learning, first-time problem solving, thinking "on your feet" and dealing with ambiguity. People who score well on cognitive ability tests are more likely to develop a greater knowledge of the job more quickly, make effective decisions and successfully reason and strategize to solve problems. In fact, a landmark study from 1998 reviewed 85 years of research and found that higher cognitive ability is linked with higher productivity and performance.

This Wednesday, the tech billionaire investor announced an investment in Luminance, a newly launched startup that uses artificial technology to read contracts in order help law firms with the arduous process of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It's not a "sexy" piece of technology, Lynch argues -- but one that has huge implications for the way we live our lives, and is indicative of a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence. What this is is probably an example of what's going to be changing a lot of things. If you can get machine technology to be reading contracts, it's going to be changing a lot of the world around us ... you're seeing the beginning of a new age." He has since founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital -- the vehicle through which the investment in Luminance was made. This week, Business Insider sat down with the investor to discuss Luminance, Brexit, his augmented reality plans, and why he likes having an "unfair advantage." Mike Lynch is an investor in Luminance -- but was also instrumental in helping create it. "The bit that makes it possible is the machine learning, and that was being done by some research people at Cambridge, and I actually have a connection because my PhD a long, long time ago was in machine learning," Lynch said. "I was introduced to them, and what they were doing looked great, but I said to them'look, you gotta go and meet some real world people.' "So they started getting real data and they met up with [law firm] Slaughter and May, and basically the machine learnt from Slaughter and May how to do these thing and at that point they made a little company. They got a CEO who is a lady who'd actually been involved in a lot of M&A deals over their career and we funded it, and it's been developing the product, and today it comes out into the bright lights of day."

Elos Medtech Pinol in Gørløse, Denmark, is one of Europe's leading development and production partners for medical technology products and components. In recent years, increasing demands for quality, process documentation, and product consistency have forced customers to use fewer suppliers. Customers have selected Elos Medtech Pinol largely due to targeted optimization, standardization, and automation in the last decade. The automated factory – a mantra used within the company that impacts all employees – includes ambitious investments in user-friendly and flexible production equipment and the latest automation technology, including an MiR100 robot from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR). In 2011, Danish robot scientist Niels Jul Jacobsen came up with a new product idea that a few years later was transformed into a product that handles internal transport logistics.

Interactive Europe's keynote presentations yesterday, Core community members shared the community's incredible, fast growth and what's next with Node.js v.7 and Node.js v8. The Node.js Foundation leadership also team looked at how to improve diversity and inclusivity in the Node.js In a year and a half, Node.js has grown from 14 to 87 contributors with commit access. About a year and a half ago, it only had 681 contributors over its entire lifecycle; the contributor list now tops 1084 individuals. Last year at almost this exact same time (only two days shy), we merged Node.js and io.js into Node.js

Russia and Syria on Saturday accused U.S.-led forces of launching an airstrike that killed 62 Syrian soldiers and wounded more than 100 at an air base in eastern Syria. U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that American warplanes carried out a strike south of Dair Alzour but it could not confirm that they hit Syrian forces. "Coalition forces believed they were striking a Daesh fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike," the statement said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. "The coalition airstrike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military." There have been fears that the U.S. military could accidentally strike Syrian or Russian forces since the air campaign against Islamic State began more than two years ago.

The Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled virtual assistant, is seen at it's product launch for Britain and Germany in London, Britain, September 14, 2016. What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light.

A pipe bomb exploded in a Jersey Shore town Saturday shortly before thousands of runners were due to participate in a charity 5-kilometer race to benefit Marines and sailors, authorities said. No injuries were reported in the blast at Seaside Park around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Ocean County prosecutor's office. He also said no surrounding structures suffered any apparent damage. The third annual Semper Five run was canceled and the immediate area was put on lockdown. The pipe bomb was in a plastic garbage can when it exploded, Della Fave said.