While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day. Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens--and I've often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

If you want to see some of the stuff that Tay tweeted, head over here.

Developers gathered at the Microsoft BUILD developers conference in San Francisco to hear about the latest and greatest from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come."

The robots are coming, or so media have proclaimed in recent months. The world of work is about to undergo a revolution as advances in technology mean that many jobs humans do now will likely be done by machines instead in a matter of years. How many roles will go and what sectors will be most affected is open to debate but it seems certain widespread change is upon us. According to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report published in January, more than seven million jobs are at risk from advances in technology in the world's largest economies over the next five years. If anything this is a conservative estimate.

The European Union is looking to connected vehicles and autonomous driving to reduce traffic fatalities, after a disappointing year for road safety. Last year, 26,000 died on European roads, up 1 percent on the previous year. "The latest figures are disappointing. For the second year in a row, we have not managed to reduce the number of victims on our roads," said European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc, presenting the EU's latest study of traffic accident statistics in Brussels on Thursday. Disappointing though the rise is, EU roads are still among the safest in the world, with traffic fatalities down 17 percent since 2010, after a reduction of 43 percent in the previous decade.

The internet, and more importantly how we consume data from the web, has evolved at an incredible pace in recent years. One thing that has been steadily growing, and is only now really starting to make the headlines is Machine Learning. "Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on."

After attempts to silence, lobotomize and generally "make adjustments" to the recent spate of artificial intelligence bots deemed too rude, insulting or in some cases, fascist, to be allowed to continue interacting with the public, steps are now being taken for the worst offenders to undergo an ominously-titled "program of re-education". Research teams, dedicated to imbuing their virtual consciousnesses with conversational understanding through interactions with people, are trialling an "AI educator" governed by content technology pioneer Bibblio. The UK-based platform is using its knowledge of so-called "smart recommendations" of learning content to teach maverick bots the error of their ways. The artificial intelligences will directly communicate with each other during the tutoring process, in what one can only guess will probably resemble Dead Poets Society crossed with Dangerous Minds, as a Williams-Pfeiffer hybrid uses the beauty of academia to win the hearts and minds of their glitched charges. "In an attempt to avoid the AI apocalypse, it's best to be on the right side of technology."

People often ask how we've been able to learn about and cover so many different and diverse topics in machine learning (using at least three different programming languages - Python, Matlab, and R) and generally achieve such prominence in the community, all this in a relatively short time. Today we finally give a definitive answer. There's no Zygmunt the Polish economist ever willing to relocate to San Francisco. And the "we" that we always use in the posts is not majestic plural. We are three Chinese PhD students: Ah, Hai and Wang.

As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

"AI is transforming the entire world of technology. Much of this progress is due to the ability of learning algorithms to spot patterns in larger and larger amounts of data. Today this is powering everything from web search to self-driving cars. This insatiable hunger for processing data has caused the bleeding edge of machine learning to shift from CPU computing, to cloud, to GPU, to HPC," observes Andrew Ng, the Chief Scientist at Baidu. Ng will describe this in more detail at his much-anticipated upcoming talk, How HPC in Supercharging Machine Learning at the June ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany.