LAGOS--Nigeria is beating the West at its own word game, using a strategy that sounds like Scrabble sacrilege. By relentlessly studying short words, this country of 500 languages has risen to dominate English's top lexical contest. Last November, for the final of Scrabble's 32-round World Championship in Australia, Nigeria's winningest wordsmith, Wellington Jighere, defeated Britain's Lewis Mackay, in a victory that led morning news broadcasts in his homeland half a world away. It was the crowning achievement for a nation that boasts more top-200 Scrabble players than any other country, including the U.K., Nigeria's former colonizer and one of the board game's legacy powers. "In other countries they see it as a game," said Mr. Jighere, now a borderline celebrity and talent scout for one of the world's few government-backed national programs.

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we'll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

Professor Bart Baesens is a professor at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a lecturer at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). He has done extensive research on analytics, customer relationship management, web analytics, fraud detection, and credit risk management. His findings have been published in well-known international journals (e.g. Machine Learning, Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Machine Learning Research, …) and presented at international top conferences. He is also author of the books Credit Risk Management: Basic Concepts, published by Oxford University Press in 2008; and Analytics in a Big Data World published by Wiley in 2014. His research is summarized at www.dataminingapps.com.

This week on TechRepublic's Business Technology Weekly podcast, hosts Dan Patterson and Bill Detwiler discuss how swarm AI won the Kentucky derby, and the real world, practical impact of artificial intelligence. Headlines: Swarm AI predicts the 2016 Kentucky Derby Hope Reese Big news in the AI world this week! HOME NEWS Baidu to Shift to AI After Government Probe Baidu is planning to switch toward developing artificial intelligence after a government probe that affected its core business. BERLIN, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 04: Visitors look at smartphones at the Lenovo stand at the 2015 IFA consumer electronics and appliances trade fair on September 4, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. The PC maker posted its first loss in six years in 2015.

NCODED are working on a Non-Profit project which aims to solve a serious problem which has affected the UK and part's of Europe for over 50 years. The problem is actually getting worse and spreading further into Europe. In our opinion the current "solution" is both in-practical and will be non-effective for the long term. NCODED is using AI based Machine Vision within an embedded device to offer a new long term solution, along with work that other's are conducting within the BioTech and other industries. We belive that we have a Unique product and therefore until a fully working prototype is finished, and all IP has been secured, then we will not be disclosing any further information about this project.

Robots can paint, but when it comes to writing, they shouldn't quit their day jobs. That's the combined conclusion from results of two contests announced this week. On the upside, artificial intelligence created some pretty impressive works for RobotArt.org's The contest challenged artists and engineers to create a robot that painted like a real artist. Essentially, the aim was to get "as many teams as possible to set up a robot that can do any sort of painting," the contest site explains.

On Thursday, we asked Google about its new custom-made chip for artificial intelligence called a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. Google politely declined to answer Recode's questions, saying only that "more information is coming later." Later in the day, after we posted our questions, Google changed its mind and gave us some short answers to a few -- but not all -- of our questions, via an email from a spokesperson. This is a big one that Google did not answer. It probably is pre-trained, but we don't know for sure.

When Bob Greifeld became Nasdaq's CEO in 2003, he was presented with outdated tools and a company that was bleeding cash and rapidly losing market share. Thirteen years later, Nasdaq has the largest market share for options and equities of any exchange in the US. Through acquisitions and partnerships, Greifeld has shaped Nasdaq into what he primarily views as a cutting-edge technology company. During a recent interview with Business Insider, Greifeld discussed his vision for the future of Nasdaq and how it fits into the exchange industry. What follows is that portion of our interview, edited for length and clarity.

We know of a few types of word analogies, like "France capital Paris" and "US currency dollar", but has anyone tried to search for all the possible analogies that can be deducted by word2vec? They would have to find modifiers that have multiple matches, like "word1 modifier word2". An algorithm could be to cluster all the difference vectors (word1-word2, for all words) and select words that are close to the centers of dense clusters. Even if we don't find all modifiers, we can infer more by combining with ontologies/word net. If we find all the types of analogy we could make a large test dataset to benchmark how capable are the various word embeddings of representing analogy.

When Bob Greifeld became Nasdaq's CEO in 2003, he was presented with outdated tools and a company that was bleeding cash and rapidly losing market share. Thirteen years later, Nasdaq has the largest market share for options and equities of any exchange in the US. Through acquisitions and partnerships, Greifeld has shaped Nasdaq into what he primarily views as a cutting-edge technology company. During a recent interview with Business Insider, Greifeld discussed his vision for the future of Nasdaq and how it fits into the exchange industry. What follows is that portion of our interview, edited for length and clarity.