The headline of a May 24, 2016 press release reads, "Nortek Acquires Next-Generation Language Processing Platform Nuiku." The release calls Nuiku "a next-generation natural language processing platform that facilitates sophisticated voice control across home automation and other applications." I'm into natural language processing -- I follow NLP and applications as an industry analyst and consultant -- so when my friends at Slator asked my take on the transaction, I thought I'd take a closer look. How could I not, reading that "Nuiku is a leader in natural language processing," even though the claimant is biased: Nortek CEO Michael J. Clarke? So was this a successful exit pure and simple -- a favorable sign for other NLP start-ups -- or is there more one can learn and infer from the acquisition?

CrowdFlower is announcing that it has raised 10 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Microsoft, with participation from Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures. The San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of 38 million, according to CrunchBase. CrowdFlower launched at the TechCrunch50 conference back in 2009, billing itself "labor as a service" tool using platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to help businesses tap a remote, crowdsourced workforce for mundane tasks like photo moderation. Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald (who I've known and been friendly with since college) said that the company's current focus is on a new artificial intelligence product.

Stuart Armstrong is a philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors. Machines are becoming more intelligent every year thanks to advances being made by companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. AI agents, as they're sometimes known, can already beat us at complex board games like Go and they're becoming more competent in a range of other areas. Now a London AI research lab owned by Google has carried out a study to make sure we can pull the plug on self-learning machines when we want to. DeepMind, acquired by Google for a reported 400 million in 2014, teamed up with scientists at the University of Oxford to find a way to make sure AI agents don't learn to prevent, or seek to prevent humans from taking control.

For the first time, scientists might find out because of a machine-learning algorithm -- one that pieces together image data collected from multiple radio telescopes scattered around the globe. If it works, artificial intelligence will have contributed to our first non-artist rendering of a captivating scientific mystery. No single telescope is up for the job, because none is big enough to produce a high-quality image. And we will never build one, said Katie Bouman, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Harvard researchers on what's called the Event Horizon Telescope. "A black hole is very, very far away and very compact," Bouman said in an MIT blog post. To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers."

If there any talks about a 2016 Unemployment Extension bill in U.S. Congress, then they have been taking place behind closed doors. There's been less of an incentive now that the U.S. unemployment rate has improved to 5.5 percent. Back when the 2014 Unemployment Extension bill was being debated, the unemployment rate was hovering slightly above 6 percent. The final nail in the coffin was politics. When Congress avoided another fiscal cliff by saving the Highway Trust Fund, they did so by using two methods that were intended to provide funding for the 2014 Unemployment Extension bill.

Star Trek turned 50 in 2016. In its half-century of existence -- on TV, on the big screen, and in the worldwide community of its fans -- Star Trek has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Even casual viewers know the pointed ears, the Vulcan salute, and the meaning of "beam me up, Scotty." Yet, Star Trek does not owe its enduring popularity and its place in our collective imagination to its aliens or to its technological speculations. What makes it so unique, and so exciting, is its radical optimism about humanity's future as a society: in other words, utopia.

We stand for science and technology, high tech, human touch, education and research that matter. The University of Twente is the only campus university in the Netherlands; divided over five faculties we provide more than fifty educational programs. The University of Twente has a strong focus on personal development and talented researchers are given scope for carrying out pioneering research. The Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences strives to hold a leading position in their fields in relation to the science and technology research programs of the University of Twente. In all these fields, the faculty provides bachelor, master and professional development programs.

AI is entering Financial Services by automating processes, identifying patterns by crunching Big Data, and interacting with humans through voice. What areas of Financial Services will NOT be affected, and how will consumers buy banking and insurance services in the future? Artificial Intelligence surrounds us so seamlessly interwoven in our daily lives that we hardly pause to contemplate it during the day. Most of us carry around in our pockets our very own artificial intelligence assistants: iPhone s personal servants "Siri", Windows' "Cortana" and Android's "Google Now". All assistants communicate with us through interpreting and "understanding" natural language.

Twitter has been aflame with a pronouncement from Elon Musk. According to the visionary entrepreneur, the odds are very high that we're all living in a version of the Matrix. The logic goes something like this: If it's possible to create consciousness out of a computer, someone, either human or alien, will have done it. If they've done it, they've probably done it a number of times (since after all computers can run infinitely many programs). If that's true, then the number of consciousnesses that are simulated is probably much higher -- even orders of magnitude higher -- than the number of consciousnesses that aren't.

Might be used in some typical heavy applications we might not even know about. The first impression when a layman gets to hear about machine learning. You are surrounded by the things that consist of machine learning. The predominant tech companies are using it massively, understanding the user like never before. Recently there has been excitement at its peak regarding the launch of Netflix in India.