Massachusetts Institute of Technology students this week are recreating pivotal moments leading up to the Revolutionary War. Earlier this semester, 153 students, mostly sophomores, were tasked with building robots as part of their undergraduate mechanical engineering class. On Wednesday, 137 of those students will compete in the semifinals, on a course inspired by the American Revolution, to secure one of 16 open slots in the finals Thursday. They'll join 16 other students who have already qualified for the finals. The events, held at MIT's Johnson Ice Rink, will take the robots through obstacles that include a replica dock, boat, and church steeple.

On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they're interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was lead on the work, replied bluntly: "No. This sentiment is repeated in the accompanying draft paper, "The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users," posted to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal also run by Kirkegaard: Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form. For those concerned about ...

The Turing test has always been an approximate benchmark for good AI. In the test, a human is supposed to converse with a machine over text for five minutes; if the human doesn't realize that they are talking to a machine, then the computer passes as AI "indistinguishable" from human intelligence. DON'T MISS: To make the iPhone exciting again, Apple has to launch... an Android phone? Earlier this year, Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel noticed he was spread thin for teaching assistants for his computer science course. So Goel programmed IBM's Watson system to work as an online chatbot, answering some of the 10,000 online questions submitted by students during the course.

With all this talk about chatbots from Facebook and Microsoft, teaching artificial intelligence to be smarter has become a central topic of the tech world. But what about what AI can teach us? Ashok Goel, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, put that question to the test when he added "Jill Watson" – and chatbot powered by IBM's Watson technology– to his list of of teaching assistants for an online course. The chatbot was so good at answering questions that students did not notice their TA was made of silicon until after they'd turned in their finals. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

With all this talk about chatbots from Facebook and Microsoft, teaching artificial intelligence to be smarter has become a central topic of the tech world. But what about what AI can teach us? Ashok Goel, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, put that question to the test when he added "Jill Watson" – and chatbot powered by IBM's Watson technology– to his list of of teaching assistants for an online course. The chatbot was so good at answering questions that students did not notice their TA was made of silicon until after they'd turned in their finals. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May.

One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback," he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment. Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. "Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback," wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students. Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.

Artificial intelligence: students were surprised to learn they had been dealing with a bot all semester. To help with his class this year, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor's overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson's true identity to students until after they'd turned in their final exams.

Now that high school seniors have made the fateful choice of a college to attend in the fall, their parents are free to pull out tufts of hair as they figure out how to pay for it. Scholarships are life-saving options, but they can be hard to ferret out, says San Francisco-based startup Schoold, which offers a free college-planning mobile app. The company, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to personalize help for individual students, today announced a new "Scholarship" function on its app. It will automatically surface details on study grants and awards that could work for each particular user. The app takes into account the student's intended college, major, interests, and other elements of the profile they create on the app.

To a class of over 300 students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there didn't seem to be anything unusual about the new teaching assistant, Jill Watson. They never met Ms. Watson, but she always responded to emails quickly and casually. Like any good TA, Ms. Watson's involvement was low-key but helpful. "She was the person –well, the teaching assistant– who would remind us of due dates and post questions in the middle of the week to spark conversations," student Jennifer Gavin told the Journal. Some students envisioned their TA as a young PhD hopeful.

The following is an excerpt from a current work of mine. I thought I'd share it here, as some people have told me they enjoyed it. As I'll stress repeatedly, a matrix represents a linear map between two vector spaces. Writing it in the form of an matrix is merely a very convenient way to see the map concretely. But it obfuscates the fact that this map is, well, a map, not an array of numbers.