While brands have scrambled to launch Facebook Messenger chatbots since the social media behemoth opened up the channel for development last year, the early results haven't been particularly promising. Facebook is seeing a 70% failure rate among those 35,000 or so bots when it comes to understanding user requests. To combat this poor performance, Facebook is making some changes to Messenger, including adding a persistent menu that will allow users to choose from a number of requests or statements instead of using natural language and risking stumping the bot entirely. There's no question that AI will play a huge role in the future of retail, but in these early days of chatbots and virtual assistants, how do you reap the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls of this emerging technology? We caught up with Linc engineer Alessandro Sanchez to talk about the potential weaknesses in current chatbots and how smart brands are creating a chatbot experience that beats the odds and delivers great service.

Sign-up to download the forthcoming report: "Artificial Intelligence: Teaching Machines to Think Like People," by Jack Clark. This interview is one in a series of interviews that will be featured in the report. A better understanding of the reasons why neurons spike could lead to smart AI systems that can store more information more efficiently, according to Geoff Hinton, who is often referred to as the "godfather" of deep learning. Geoff Hinton is an emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Toronto and an engineering fellow at Google. He is one of the pioneers of neural networks, and was part of the small group of academics that nursed the technology through a period of tepid interest, funding, and development.

Amazon has been using algorithms to try to sell you extra stuff for years. But the technology to personalise merchandising, much further than recommendations, is advancing rapidly across ecommerce. Companies such as Sentient and Apptus and their AI-powered systems are changing site search functionality, product lists, facets and more, to try to generate more sales. I caught up with Sören Meelby, VP Marketing at Apptus, to get an introduction to the technology (Apptus eSales), and to pose some questions about the user experience in online retail. Sören Meelby: Each and every sort order typically follows a logic or business rules and'most popular' is fairly straight forward.

AMLG: Gary I'm super excited to have you today, thanks for coming on the show. We first met a few years ago in New York when I was running a tech meetup, the Singularity society, and you kindly came and spoke. You've been a professor of psychology at NYU for many years where your work has focused on language, biology, and the human mind. You've spent decades studying how children learn, and then in 2015 you founded this startup called Geometric Intelligence, focused on mining cognitive psychology for insights into building better machine learning techniques. Just this past December you were acquired by Uber to run their newly founded AI labs -- congratulations on that exit. So your algorithms offer an alternative approach to what is now a very popular branch of machine learning, called deep learning. Let's talk about deep learning -- it's a sexy buzzword which is thrown into about every startup pitch I see these days, and many corporate presentations, so I'm sure listeners have heard the term. What it really is is a rebranding of an old technique of using neural nets, which dates back to the 50s. Neural nets basically mimic the human neocortex, and by feeding in massive amounts, gigabytes of data and using tons of computational power, the algorithms are able to recognize patterns. Part of the reason why this technique is back in vogue is the combination of increasingly powerful computers combined with the massive training datasets that companies are building up. So there's been a flurry of activity, and the Googles and Facebooks of the world are throwing resources at the technique. As just one example, Facebook, using the over 400 billion photos people have uploaded, has built something called DeepFace, an image recognition tool that's now better than humans at recognizing whether two different images are of the same person. Gary you are well known as a critic of this technique, you've said that it's over-hyped. That there's some low hanging fruit that deep learning's good at -- specific narrow tasks like perception and categorization, and maybe beating humans at chess, but you felt that this deep learning mania was taking the field of AI in the wrong direction, that we're not making progress on cognition and strong AI. Or as you've put it, "we wanted Rosie the robot, and instead we got the roomba."

What do you think of when you hear the phrases "Future Tech" or "Science Fiction Technology?" Humanoid robots walking the streets? Today we're looking at science fiction #technology that was once just a fantasy, that is now part of our daily life. We are also going to take a peek at some of our favorite sci-fi tech, and see how close it is to being a reality. "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." ("My Own View," The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) Believe it or not, credit cards were first mentioned in science fiction. You might expect that the individual who envisioned the credit card to be a genius businessman or bank executive of some sort, however the person who first developed the idea of the modern credit card system was a Utopian science fiction author Edward Bellamy.

SAP Labs in India is the second largest R&D centre for the company after its centre in Walldorf, Germany and among the three hubs in the SAP Labs network of 19 Labs across 16 countries. Dilipkumar Khandelwal, MD for SAP Labs in India, has a dual role as he is also the EVP and Global Head of Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP. In an exclusive interview with Ayushman Baruah, Khandelwal talks about their India focus, latest technologies, and their emphasis on innovation. Excerpts: What is the SAP Lab's focus here? Over a period of 19 years, SAP Labs India has evolved to become an integral part of SAP's global strategy.

Earlier this week, the Samsung Galaxy S8 line of devices were announced with tremendous fanfare. The Galaxy S8 serves as a symbol of Samsung's comeback story following the Galaxy Note 7 debacle. In my opinion, the pros of the Galaxy S8 outweigh the cons. However, there is one specific con that has been making the headlines today. Early reviewers of the Galaxy S8 discovered a security flaw in the facial recognition feature.

The world is going to change more over the next five years than it has over the last fifteen. That, at least, is the opinion of Jeremy Waites, who describes himself as just a lowly storyteller, traveling around to telling tales about cool stuff. Officially that makes him an evangelist, and the'cool stuff' on which he evangelises is IBM's AI system, Watson. I met up with him at the recent Cloud Expo in London to discuss some of the wider issues about where AI fits in the business and wider world, what it can bring to those parties, and what impact it might have on the way work changes – or indeed continues to exist. Like a growing number of people in the AI business Waites is keen to stress that the'A' does not stand for'Artificial', but rather for'Augmented', on the basis that the former carries with it all those scary, sci-fi connotations.

How to Cut Cake Fairly.

Do you think you can read emotions like joy or anger in another person's face and actions? Read them because joy and anger are universal emotions and we all know what they look and feel like? Well, if so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, you are winging it, guessing at best. Emotions like happiness and despair are not baked into our brains, waiting to be triggered by experiences in the world. Sure, we have a range of feelings, stimulated by our senses. But those feelings cannot be categorized as emotions innate in everyone. What we call emotions, Barrett says, are concepts constructed by our individual neural systems, molded by our cultures and past experiences. In her new and first book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, based on years of research at her neuroscience lab at Northeastern University, Barrett spells out the "theory of constructed emotion."