Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said. "The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets."

Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said.

Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said.

Integrate speech analytics and text search with powerful speech-to-text, natural language processing, and classification APIs to analyze sales and support call recordings in your CRM, Support and Service Management systems. Ensure regulatory compliance, investigate transaction disputes, and minimize litigation risk. Don't only rely on agents for tagging case records. Improve call classifications, make search and retrieval of calls easy.

Given the impressive advancement of machine intelligence in recent years, many people have been speculating on what the future holds when it comes to the power and roles of robots in our society. Some have even called for regulation of machine intelligence before it's too late. My take on this issue is that there is no need to speculate – machine intelligence is already here, with greedy robots already dominating our lives. The problem with talking about artificial intelligence is that it creates an inflated expectation of machines that would be completely human-like – we won't have true artificial intelligence until we can create machines that are indistinguishable from humans. While the goal of mimicking human intelligence is certainly interesting, it is clear that we are very far from achieving it.

Most discussions of "robot rights" play out in a seemingly distant, science-fictional future. While skeptics roll their eyes, advocates argue that technology will advance to the point where robots deserve moral consideration because they are "just like us," sometimes referencing the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner depicts a world where androids have human-like emotions and develop human-like relationships to the point of being indistinguishable from people. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel on which the film is based, contains a small, significant difference in storyline. In the book, the main character falls in love with an android that only pretends to requite his feelings.

Patent lawsuits are costly and time-consuming. An ability to forecast a patent litigation and time to litigation allows companies to better allocate budget and time in managing their patent portfolios. We develop predictive models for estimating the likelihood of litigation for patents and the expected time to litigation based on both textual and non-textual features. Our work focuses on improving the state-of-the-art by relying on a different set of features and employing more sophisticated algorithms with more realistic data. The rate of patent litigations is very low, which consequently makes the problem difficult. The initial model for predicting the likelihood is further modified to capture a time-to-litigation perspective.

Policymakers in Washington could learn something from Lee's agile response to the evolving challenges posed by the artificial-intelligence revolution. Artificial intelligence is on its way to ubiquity, and we're not ready for it. Already it has entered the landscape of the physical world in delightful and dangerous new ways, with Google leading the charge in many different industries. Yet policymakers seem trapped in the regulatory frameworks of the 20th century. In two of the most prominent A.I.-linked industries, autonomous vehicles and drones, current legal regimes are already insufficient.

The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture--that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world--that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us. You'll have a figure say, "The computers will take over the Earth, but that's a good thing, because people had their chance and now we should give it to the machines."

With the best human player of boardgame Go being defeated this month by Google software, lawyers shouldn't make the mistake of believing their skills are beyond the reach of artificial intelligence (AI), write Stéphane Leriche and Michael Stojanovic. In early March, Google's DeepMind and its AlphaGo software beat the best human player of the ancient Chinese board game, Go, in a series of much-hyped matches. AI-powered legal tools are already a reality, and the success of AlphaGo demonstrates that the technology to make these tools better now exists. IBM's Watson cognitive computer won the TV game show Jeopardy! in 2011. Watson's question-answering technology has since been adapted to produce ROSS, a legal research virtual assistant that its developers promote as a'super intelligent attorney'.