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.

Tiny rockets are going to be sent into space to study the far universe in the most ambitious space exploration project in history. Scientists including Stephen Hawking and backers such as internet investor Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg will send "nano craft" deep into space to explore the most remote regions that humans have ever seen, by far. The hugely ambitious project could reveal deep secrets of the universe and will allow people to photograph one of the most likely places to hold life on other worlds. The Starshot Project hopes to get the tiny robots out to the Alpha Centauri star system, 25 trillion years away. Getting there through normal means would take 30,000 years – but the new project hopes that using the tiny rockets will allow them to get there in just 20.

Penguins living in the Antarctic Ocean are under threat from a variety of factors including climate change, fisheries and human disturbance. In spite of studying the region for over a hundred years, scientists have still not developed a way to measure changes in penguin populations. Now researchers have developed a new way to keep an eye on penguins, using 50 cameras and the help of the general public. Penguins living in the Antarctic Ocean are under threat from a variety of factors including climate change, fisheries and human disturbance. The Penguins Lifeline project at the University of Oxford has been running since 2009.

McKinsey analysts recently asked how traditional industries are now using machine learning to gather fresh business insights. With processing power so cheap, chewing through petabytes of data in order for machine learning to happen is no longer an activity restricted to science boffins or the cash-rich. No surprise then that the McKinsey list documents impressive examples in America. "This past spring, contenders for the US National Basketball Association championship relied on the analytics of Second Spectrum, a California machine-learning start-up. By digitizing the past few seasons' games, it has created predictive models that allow a coach to distinguish between, as CEO Rajiv Maheswaran puts it, "a bad shooter who takes good shots and a good shooter who takes bad shots"--and to adjust his decisions accordingly".

The robots are coming -- to help run your life or sell you stuff -- at an online texting service near you. In coming months, users of Facebook's Messenger app, Microsoft's Skype and Canada's Kik can expect to find new automated assistants offering information and services at a variety of businesses. These messaging "chatbots" are basically software that can conduct human-like conversation and do simple jobs once reserved for people. Google and other companies are reportedly working on similar ideas. In Asia, software butlers are already part of the landscape.

A keen-eyed new robot looks poised to snag an important everyday warehouse job. Kinema Systems, a startup based in Menlo Park, California, has developed a robot capable of breaking down pallets of boxes no matter what size or shape they are or how they are packed together. This is a routine job at thousands of large stores, warehouses, and shipping companies--the aftermath of goods making their way through the supply line to your front door. The new robot uses a simple suction system to grab boxes, but it needs state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning to figure out how to grab them. The machine does not need to be programmed at all--instead, it automatically calibrates itself and teaches itself how to break boxes down.

Since Google's computer program AlphaGo won four out of five matches against South Korea's champion Go player, Japanese governmental officials are seriously wondering whether artificial intelligence (AI) is the way to rewrite Japan's blueprint for the future. There is precedent for programs beating humans. IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and in 2012, computer programs beat professionals of Shogi, also known as Japanese chess. But the Japanese government has never been as shaken as this time. That's because Go, which is played on a grid of 19 horizontal lines and 19 vertical lines, is considered "the last bastion of human intelligence."

In the last couple of years, one of the most interesting application areas where machine learning has found traction is crime prediction. City police departments, across the globe, have been enthusiastically embracing the technological intervention that can improve crime analysis or its prevention rates. By focusing on crime prediction, police forces can not only focus on increasing optimization and efficiency in police force deployment but also prevent crimes. While we are far from the science fiction of Minority Report becoming a truth, various reports have suggested that implementation of these software has helped police departments in either preventing or accurately predicting crimes by approximately 10-15%. This is a significant number, given that we are talking about saving human lives at risk here.

PRINCETON – Last month, AlphaGo, a computer program specially designed to play the game Go, caused shockwaves among aficionados when it defeated Lee Sidol, one of the world's top-ranked professional players, winning a five-game tournament by a score of 4-1. Why, you may ask, is that news? Twenty years have passed since the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and we all know computers have improved since then. But Deep Blue won through sheer computing power, using its ability to calculate the outcomes of more moves to a deeper level than even a world champion can. Go is played on a far larger board (19 by 19 squares, compared to 8x8 for chess) and has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, so raw computing power was unlikely to beat a human with a strong intuitive sense of the best moves.

Employing robots and artificial intelligence in Chinese restaurants has turned out to be not such a smart idea after all, with restaurants in Guangzhou either closing down or firing their mechanical staff.