It's Moogfest season here in Durham, so there's been a lot of the discussion in the office around music, data lakes, and the heat map we're building for the festival. But the conversation took a different turn, thanks to a tweet. Many months ago when I was at IBM Insight, I tweeted a snide remark about computer-generated jokes. Fast-forward to this week, when former "Monk" and Letterman writer Joe Toplyn responded with a link "proving" that computers could generate jokes that were funny ... at least to the easily amused. Amid the discussion, someone drove by playing crappy autotune pop music. This got me thinking about whether you could generate hit pop songs.

At the NASCIO Mid-Year Conference in Baltimore last week, Government Technology talked to state CIOs about whether cognitive computing can help them deal with the data deluge. Wisconsin CIO David Cagigal sees a definite role for technology that learns from citizen behavior to inform services and anticipate future needs. Government Technology editor Noelle Knell has more than 15 years of writing and editing experience, covering public projects, transportation, business and technology. A California native, she has worked in both state and local government, and is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, with majors in political science and American history. She can be reached via email and on Twitter.

If you believe the alarmists out there, robots are eventually going to take every job. They're already being hired as advertising executives, legal aides, and teacher's assistants, and making art and music. So perhaps it's inevitable that they will be able to write movies in the future. But it doesn't seem they're quite there yet. Led by director Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin, a team in London made a film for a 48-hour film challenge by feeding a neural network a series of random script idea prompts and recording the result.

Human communication goes beyond words. It is complex, rich in nuances and frequently includes non-verbal signs. Yet despite our technological limitations it is not impossible for some aspects of communication to be emulated by a machine with surprising effect. This has been part of the challenge in developing Harlie (Human and Robot Language Interaction Experiment), a smartphone chatbot app developed by researchers at the CSIRO and University of Queensland. It's primarily aimed at people who may have trouble conversing including those with neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia, or even autism.

Graduates of a Southern California high school received a head-scratching surprise on their diploma covers Thursday. Students of the Ontario High School class of 2016 received their diploma covers with an egregious spelling error on the front. Photos on social media showed the cover was spelled as "Ontario High Shcool." A Chaffey Joint Union High School District official told KTLA Friday that a "printing error" was to blame for the typo that was on the covers. "The misspelling was a printing error made by the grad products company," Chaffey Joint Union High School District Superintendent Mathew Holton said in a statement to KTLA.

Or rather, it's the answer offered by the fictional supercomputer Deep Thought--

The most spectacular example of this was the Hortonworks IPO – a success by any measure. As we look forward to 2015, it is clear that while big data technologies still have a long ways to go in terms of enterprise adoption, its ultimate adoption is no longer in question. Enterprises have bought into the promise of big data – leaving the innovators in storage, analytics and visualization to deliver the results. The following represent some thoughts on what to expect in the intervening twelve months – and what lies just beyond. Innovative companies have been using Machine Learning in a variety of use cases for several years now – but for the most part they have been technology companies developing systems for themselves and for specific cases.

Human communication goes beyond words. It is complex, rich in nuances and frequently includes non-verbal signs. Yet despite our technological limitations it is not impossible for some aspects of communication to be emulated by a machine with surprising effect. This has been part of the challenge in developing Harlie (Human and Robot Language Interaction Experiment), a smartphone chatbot app developed by researchers at the CSIRO and University of Queensland. It's primarily aimed at people who may have trouble conversing including those with neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia, or even autism. The following dialog excerpt took place between a human who has autism, let's call him Chris (pseudonym), and Harlie.

The Burning Man vibe was intentional. For Google I/O this year -- its annual developer conference, typically held in San Francisco's antiseptic Moscone convention center -- the company stayed in Mountain View, camping out at Shoreline Amphitheatre, a grassy concert hall just a short bike ride away from its headquarters. The keynote kicked off with a wink to the libertine festival. From control booths in the back of the theater, a woman in a leather vest and a man in a collarless blazer strummed a supersized string instrument made from cords that hung in the air high above the audience -- an Earth Harp that previously made an appearance in Black Rock City. Google parked a massive "art car" shaped like a ship and festooned with Burning Man bumper stickers in the middle of its sandbox playground for new software and hardware.

Alphabet's Google unveiled its answer to Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant along with new messaging and virtual reality products at its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, doubling down on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the keys to its future. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant, along with the tabletop speaker appliance Google Home. He also unveiled Allo, a new messaging service that will compete with Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger products and feature a chatbot powered by the Google Assistant. Allo, such as WhatsApp, will also have end-to-end encryption when it is rolled out this summer. Amazon's Echo, a surprise hit that has other tech giants racing to match it, uses a virtual assistant called Alexa, a cloud-based system that controls the Echo speaker and responds to voice-controlled commands by users.