Artificial-intelligence software designed by Microsoft to tweet like a teenage girl has been suspended after it began spouting offensive remarks. Microsoft says it's making adjustments to the Twitter chatbot after users found a way to manipulate it to tweet racist and sexist remarks and make a reference to Hitler. The chatbot debuted on Wednesday and is designed to learn how to communicate through conversations with real humans. It targets young Americans, ages 18 to 24. Microsoft's statement Thursday says that within 24 hours, "we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways." Most messages have been deleted.

Geri Richmond and Hashemite University molecular biologist Rana Dajani spoke after Richmond's AAAS presidential address to open the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting. Some of the most intriguing news at the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting focused on the tiny: a miniscule cosmic ripple born 1.5 billion years ago, and a millimeters-long mosquito responsible for an emerging health crisis. But the science behind these discoveries is huge in scope and in importance, reflecting the ongoing achievement of international research teams addressing complex challenges in science and society. Efforts to track the spread of Zika virus in the Americas, and the landmark discovery of gravitational waves, both demonstrate the power and potential--and the need--for global collaborations between scientists, speakers emphasized at the 11 to 15 February event, held in Washington, DC. In particular, scientists in developing countries must work as equal partners with their counterparts in developed countries to solve border-crossing challenges like climate change and virus outbreaks, said outgoing AAAS President Geri Richmond in her address at the start of the meeting.

My real-life cat, it appears, has been frustrated with me lately. Oh, she's still spoiled, but there have been a couple of occasions in which my attention has been diverted from her to a wholly digital feline. "Super Phantom Cat," to be specific, has won my heart. "Super Phantom Cat" even seems self-aware. "Love," the game tells players, "lights up the sad and cold chamber of your heart."

There are a lot of mobile games out there -- last year more than 100,000 iOS games were released in North America. They're worse when your girlfriend is scattered around the galaxy. In this iOS game a young boy tries to put back together his first love, a female robot, and learns to live on his own along the way. Words come to life in "Story Warriors: Fairy Tales." Words come to life in "Story Warriors: Fairy Tales."

Microsoft's A.I. chatbot started out as an innocent, interesting experiment. Then the rest of the Internet showed up. After Twitter users were able to convince Tay, the name of Microsoft's chatbot available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, it appears Microsoft is giving it a break. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon," reads a statement on the website for Tay.

This month I spent part of my free time to go through the'March Machine Learning Mania 2016' competition, by studying the subject and by attending two meetups here in London. The objective of the Kaggle competition was to predict the 2016 NCAA Basketball Tournament, called March Madness. It was a very enjoyable experience. You might think, what the heck has this to do with HR Analytics, the subject in which I am normally interested in. Predicting performance through machine learning algorithms is a crucial aspect for HR Analytics.

Google today announced at its GCP NEXT conference in San Francisco a new service called Cloud Machine Learning in a limited preview. The tool relies on the TensorFlow machine learning library that Google open-sourced a few months ago. And it powers another new product called the Google Cloud Speech API, as well as the Google Cloud Translate API. Google's launch of the service follows the launch of the Cloud Vision API recently. But a machine learning platform is something that public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services beat Google to.

Microsoft Corp. is in damage control mode after Twitter users exploited its new artificial intelligence chat bot, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks. The company introduced Tay earlier this week to chat with real humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. The Internet took advantage and quickly tried to see how far it could push Tay.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

The automation of work and the digital disruption of business models place a premium on leaders who can create a vision of change and frame it positively. How disruptive will accelerating workplace automation be for organizations in the future? For decades, businesses have deployed technology to reduce costs and complexity, make better products, and develop new business models. But the new potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics poses major new challenges for leaders as they seek to reset their strategies for a digital age. Last November, Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer and Nadir Mohamed, the recently retired CEO of Rogers Communications, sat down with Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor at INSEAD, and Harvard professor Robert Kegan to debate some of the issues with Claudio Feser, head of McKinsey's leadership development initiative.