A user demonstrates the look and feel of Windows 10 operating system for smartphones and at the Microsoft stall at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, Germany. SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft has made yet another acquisition designed to retool the former software king into an enterprise solutions leader. The Redmond, Wash-based company announced Monday that it was buying virtual-assistant start-up Genee for an undisclosed sum, according to blog posts by Microsoft and Genee executives. The move comes on the heels of Microsoft's 26 billion purchase of professional networking site LinkedIn, a bold chess move by CEO Satya Nadella as he aims to make his company's cloud-based Office 365 platform ubiquitous in the business environment. Genee makes software that uses artificial intelligence to schedule appointments.

Whether you call it soccer or football, this sport is the world's favorite to watch and play. Thanks to Hugo Mathien who compiled, cleaned, and shared a dataset of stats on European professional football on Kaggle, it can become a data scientist's favorite playground, too. Among other data points, the database includes 25,000 matches from 2008 to 2011, 10,000 players from 11 countries, and betting odds from up to 10 providers. This impressive collection of data allows Kagglers test their machine learning techniques by building models predicting match outcomes (can you beat the bookies?) and find insights through data visualization and storytelling. In this interview, Hugo explains how he pulled data from a number of sources using Python's Scrapy and overcame data integrity issues with manual effort to build this incredible dataset for Kagglers to enjoy.

By John Markoff SUNNYVALE: For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence (AI)and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

From July 20th to July 28th 2016, I had the opportunity of attending the 6th Lisbon Machine Learning School. The Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS) is an annual event that brings together researchers and graduate students in the fields of NLP and Computational Linguistics, computer scientists with an interest in statistics and ML, and industry practitioners with a desire for a more in-depth understanding. Participants had a chance to join workshops and labs, where they got hands-on experience with building and exploring state-of-the-art deep learning models, as well as to attend talks and speeches by prominent deep learning and NLP researchers from a variety of academic and industrial organisations. You can find the entire programme here. In this blog post, I am going to share some of the highlights, key insights and takeaways of the summer school.

A global hub of the machinery industry, Taiwan is stepping up efforts to develop innovative smart manufacturing technologies. From May 20-24 this year, about 30,000 visitors, including buyers from Asia, Europe and the U.S., flocked to the Commercial Exhibition Center in Taichung City, central Taiwan for the Automatic Machinery and Intelligent Manufacturing Exhibition. The trade show has been staged annually in Taichung for more than three decades, though this marked the first time that intelligent manufacturing was used in the title of the event. Organizer Commercial Times, one of the country's two major financial newspapers, opted to alter the name of the show to highlight the growing focus on this field in the nation's globally competitive machinery sector. "This is the 32nd edition of our machinery show in Taichung. But unlike previous events, this year's exhibition features intelligent machines to reflect the current trend in manufacturing systems development," Chen Kuo-wei (???), president of Commercial Times, said at the opening ceremony of the five-day event, which generated business deals totaling about NT 300 million (US 9.2 million).

A drone was confiscated earlier this month after it crashed at a north London jail with drugs and cell phones, according to police. The drone was not alone: Another was seen later that day and caught mid-flight. The drone seizures followed a man acting suspiciously near the prison just one day before the drones were caught. That man ran from police when confronted, dropping two bags of drugs and phones, according to the BBC. No arrests have been made so far in connection to the drugs, phones and drones.

Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world's first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September. Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses. "This is actually a really big deal right now," Harri Santamala, project manager at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and the test project lead, told a local news outlet. SEE: When will we get driverless cars?