How do you feel about conversations with bots so far? Are they engaging, disappointing or interesting? For bot makers, there are lots of challenges in crafting more engaging bots. Challenge 1: Getting inspiration for how to build your bot based on how others built theirs. You can't just search for bots based on the meta details in conversations, because there isn't such a database.

Of the vast wealth of information unlocked by the Internet, most is plain text. The data necessary to answer myriad questions--about, say, the correlations between the industrial use of certain chemicals and incidents of disease, or between patterns of news coverage and voter-poll results--may all be online. But extracting it from plain text and organizing it for quantitative analysis may be prohibitively time consuming. Information extraction--or automatically classifying data items stored as plain text--is thus a major topic of artificial-intelligence research. Last week, at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory won a best-paper award for a new approach to information extraction that turns conventional machine learning on its head.

Researchers from the US have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that surfs the internet, extracts information from the available plain text and organises it for quantitative analysis in very less time. Recently at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory won a best-paper award for a new approach to information extraction that turns conventional machine learning on its head. Most machine-learning systems work by combing through training examples and looking for patterns that correspond to classifications provided by human annotators. In their new paper, the MIT researchers trained their system on scanty data -- because in the scenario they're investigating, that's usually all that's available. But then they find the limited information an easy problem to solve.

An Australian man acquitted of killing a woman on a Tinder date has been asked if he is "heartless" in a controversial TV interview. New Zealand woman Warriena Wright fell to her death from Gable Tostee's balcony on Queensland's Gold Coast in 2014. Last month, Mr Tostee was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter. Australia's 60 Minutes programme paid him A$150,000 (£90,000, $115,000) for Sunday's interview, local media said. Mr Tostee and Ms Wright had met through the dating app Tinder.

Leon Russell called his best-known composition "A Song for You," but a better title might've been "A Song for You -- and You and You and You and You." The heartfelt ballad, instantly recognizable from its opening cascade of delicate piano notes, first appeared on Russell's self-titled debut album in 1970. That's a decade after this singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist -- who died Sunday at age 74 -- moved to Los Angeles from his native Oklahoma and quickly established himself as a go-to session player. Since then, though, "A Song for You" has been recorded and performed hundreds of times by artists as diverse as Donny Hathaway, the Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Amy Winehouse and the rapper Bizzy Bone. In 1994, Ray Charles won a Grammy for his moving rendition of the tune.

HB, who is paralysed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), has become the first woman to use a brain implant at home and in her daily life. She told New Scientist about her experiences using an eye-tracking device that takes about a minute to spell a word. What is your life like? I can only move my eyes. Why did you decide to try the implant?

Ever think your smartphone is vibrating or ringing when it isn't? It's such a common phenomenon that researchers gave the problem, which plagues between 70% and 90% of smartphone users, a name: phantom vibration syndrome. Some people find themselves so unhealthily attached to or distracted by their digital devices that they go on technology fasts to help them detach. Entrepreneur Rand Hindi says the problem isn't technology but the way we interact with it. Hindi, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in France, started coding at age 10, launched a web development agency at age 15, and earned his PhD in bioinformatics while working as a consultant on algorithmic trading.

The most entertaining video we posted on Video Friday a couple weeks ago was almost certainly Robot Drone Man, a parody of this PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) video, which for some reason has 150 million views on YouTube. Parody or not, Robot Drone Man actually exists, and it's a project of Ilhan Bae, a researcher and futurist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who wrote in to tell us about it. Robot Drone Man is an avatar drone, in the same category as other telepresence robots like Double and Beam. It allows a remote human to have an embodied physical presence through a mobile robot, although in this case, the robot can fly, since most of it is a DJI S1000 octocopter. With a height of 1.4 meters (landed), it's designed to match the eye level of people interacting with it, and the remote operator can "gesticulate with two hands and head as if a distant operator exists in person," says Bae, adding that this is "the first trial to couple a telepresence robot in an upright position and drone platform into one body."

"That would bother me a lot and it would bother others. "So yes, it can be used for bad outcomes. It's incumbent on us to make sure it's not concentrated in the hands of people who can implement this without checks and balances." Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner and world-renowned physicist, also drew attention to the dark side of AI last month. For the moment artificial intelligence poses no immediate or obvious threat, but experts say it is a matter of time and work needs to be done now.

I first got speaking to Jason via Twitter and then we met at a few networking events. We quickly realised we shared an overtly cynical attitude to the vacuous tripe that emerges from Silicon Valley's startup culture, and want to resist the adoption of that culture in the Northern Ireland tech scene. When it comes to big data and machine learning, I know no one more qualified than Jason. He wrote a book about machine learning which has helped me immensely in coming to grips with the topic, even though I can't even begin to understand the mathematics behind it all. Like myself, Jason is not native to Northern Ireland, but he's been here so long he might as well be part of the furniture.