Facebook's f8 developers conference marks the rise of the chatbots. The social networking giant unveiled its Messenger Platform on Tuesday, which will leverage "chatbots" that interact with users and perform several tasks while remaining in the app, including shopping. For a recap of the keynote, scroll down for our live updates. "So we set out to build the perfect 360-degree camera," he says. Facebook unveils the Facebook Surround 360 camera.

SAN FRANCISCO -- You already chat with friends on Facebook Messenger. Now Messenger wants you to chat with businesses and get updates from them, too. That's the future Facebook pitched Tuesday at f8, its annual conference for software developers in San Francisco. "We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend," Mark Zuckerberg said on stage at f8. He laughed: "To order flowers on 1-800-Flowers,you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again."

In 1950, artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing famously proposed what came to be known as the Turing Test: the proposition that a machine had achieved intelligence if it could carry on a conversation that was indistinguishable from a human one. In 2016, Turing's ghost has come to haunt Silicon Valley in a big way. Companies are racing to build technology that can talk with you. Last month, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Bot Framework, a set of software tools that let companies create their own conversational bots. Customers of Domino's, for instance, can order products by chatting back and forth with a robot, as if they were sending a text message.

Machine Learning (ML) and related computational disciplines have received a lot of attention in recent years. ML enables companies to leverage the vast amount of data they are routinely collecting to personalize their offerings and to automate evidence-driven decision making. Amazon has been a pioneer in the application of ML in eCommerce, with innovations such as product recommendation engines, fraud detection, and large-scale optimization of fulfillment center operations. As Amazon continues to rapidly grow and diversify, there are numerous new opportunities for delivering steep improvements from the application of ML techniques to problems in user profiling, forecasting, natural language processing, computer vision, or robotics. I am responsible for senior hiring across Amazon globally for machine learning and applied sciences.

The universal scope of Internet advertising makes it an ideal way to attract customers and lure young participants into human trafficking activities including sex and prostitution. But behind those ads are layers of online data that can help investigators track down the criminals who organize and profit from such exploitation. A fledgling Pittsburgh startup, Marinus Analytics, has a software product, Traffic Jam, that mines the so-called "deep Web" for information and clues about trafficking operations. It is being used by law enforcement officials, including the FBI, to identify offenders and rescue victims. Emily Kennedy, the founder of Marinus founder and its chief executive, began developing the product while she was a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

It's a tantalizing thought: Log onto Facebook, order a pizza from a chat bot, ask another to look for vacation packages while you ask a third to make a restaurant reservation. Facebook's annual F8 developer's conference kicks off today -- and analysts expect the social network could announce a plan for integrating chat bots onto the site. Chat bots are virtual agents able to mimic human conversation using artificial intelligence. "It's this notion of conversations as a service," Patrick Moorhead, an analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News. "The whole element of bots are we can use them exactly like we chat today -- over SMS [text messages] or Messenger. Imagine connecting with a company where it automatically is either a real human or uses AI to know exactly what you want."

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the API treasure of Microsoft. It was a jaw dropping moment when I saw more than a dozen Artificial Intelligence based APIs. This treasure has a sci-fi name and is known as Project Oxford which was announced in Build 2015 developer conference in San Francisco. As stated on Microsoft's blog - 'Project Oxford helps developer to build more intelligent apps'. This project was developed to provide the developer some complex machine learning that is otherwise not possible for a single developer to build due to time and resource constraints. These APIs will add more fun and the wow factor to an app that wasn't easy before.

Once considered the subject of our imagination, best left in the realm of science fiction, robots are now a growing technology that is rapidly changing our world. We have become accustomed to seeing them on our TV screens in cartoons such as The Jetsons (1962-1988) or in films such as Big Hero 6 (2014), Elysium (2013) or Robot and Frank (2012). Whether they are helping surgeons with keyhole surgery, manufacturing medicine or assisting the elderly, it is clear that robots have left the realm of science fiction and are a reality that may soon be coming to a home or health facility near us. There are clear benefits to using robots as seen by countries such as Japan where robots now help care for its ageing population. In the UK, which is also facing similar issues, NHS Western Isles and NHS Shetland for example have been trialling the use of a robot called'Giraff' in patients' homes.

Last week, scholars revealed an as-yet-unknown Rembrandt painting. The picture, which shows a man looking away, had the rich colors, subtle emotion, characteristic brushstrokes, and evocative play of light and shadow so characteristic of the Dutch master's style. But it turns out this mysterious picture wasn't a long-lost Rembrandt canvas uncovered in some forgotten 17th-century warehouse: It was instead made out of whole cloth by a computer algorithm and a 3D printer. The computer algorithm created the "new Rembrandt" after painstakingly studying the painter's entire corpus, then mimicking Rembrandt's painting techniques, styles and subjects. While the artistic merits of the painting are a matter of personal opinion, the process could reveal more insights into the great master's works, said Gary Schwartz, an art historian and author of "Rembrandt's Universe: His Art, His Life, His World" (Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2014).

Facebook's F8 developer conference has kicked off, and the world of tech is waiting eagerly for some big announcements. There's been a steady stream of rumours about what Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is going to unveil at the opening of the conference. Chatbots are believed to be one of the major new products, smart conversational programs built in to Facebook Messenger that can order pizzas, book taxis and reserve tickets. We're also expecting more details on its live video streaming tool, and possibly new plans for virtual reality (VR). Follow our liveblog below to keep up-to-date with all the latest news from the conference.