In July 2013, an up-and-coming artist had an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by the public, received press coverage, and featured works produced over a number of years, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a fairly typical art-world event. The only unusual feature was that the artist in question was a computer program known as "The Painting Fool." Even that was not such a novelty.

Waterloo-based messaging app Kik has launched a "bot shop" that will function a bit like Apple's App Store, only for chat bots. The Kik bot shop with exist as a special section in Kik's app. There, users can begin chatting with bot created by 16 partners, including Vine, Sephora, H&M and The Weather Channel. Prior to launching this new feature, Kik had dabbled with bots created by the likes of Vice Media and MTV, but Kik's 275 million registered users could only find the bots if Kik promoted them. So rather than switch from the Kik app, where users spend an average of 97 minutes per week, to a dedicated weather app, you ask the weather bot if it's still raining.

There's a brand new reason to worry about updating your iPhone -- if you've got one of the latest devices, anyway. People can worm their way into private photos and contacts stored within iPhone 6S and 6S Plus devices thanks to a glitch in iOS 9.3.1, the just-released version of Apple's mobile operating system. YouTube user EverythingApplePro explained the bug in a video Monday, and Mashable confirmed Tuesday that it's the real deal. The Huffington Post was also able to bypass an iPhone's lock screen using the steps outlined by EverythingApplePro. From the lock screen, you activate Siri and ask it to search Twitter for an email address.

This week's episode is dedicated entirely to Tay, the Microsoft chat bot who started her 1-day life making adorable meme jokes, and ended it praising Hitler. Tay's demise is an ominous warning about a future dominated by amoral robot overlords, and also comedy gold! All of our listeners get a 10% discount on your first month. So go sign up now and get human help with your data projects (at scale)! Last but not least, we'll be at the Austin Data Science Popup on April 13th.

Cécile B. Evans, How happy a Thing Can Be, 2014. The word'automation' is appearing in places that would have seemed unlikely to most people less than a decade ago: journalism, art, design or law. Robots and algorithms are being increasingly convincing at doing things just like humans. The Promise of Total Automation, an exhibition recently opened at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, looks at our troubled relationship with machines. Technical devices that were originally designed to serve and assist us and are now getting smarter and harder to control and comprehend.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to call it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.

Model ensembling is a very powerful technique to increase accuracy on a variety of ML tasks. In this article I will share my ensembling approaches for Kaggle Competitions. For the first part we look at creating ensembles from submission files. The second part will look at creating ensembles through stacked generalization/blending. I answer why ensembling reduces the generalization error. Finally I show different methods of ensembling, together with their results and code to try it out for yourself. This is how you win ML competitions: you take other peoples' work and ensemble them together." The most basic and convenient way to ensemble is to ensemble Kaggle submission CSV files. You only need the predictions on the test set for these methods -- no need to retrain a model. This makes it a quick way to ensemble already existing model predictions, ideal when teaming up. Let's see why model ensembling reduces error rate and why it works better to ensemble low-correlated model predictions. During space missions it is very important that all signals are correctly relayed. A coding solution was found in error correcting codes. The simplest error correcting code is a repetition-code: Relay the signal multiple times in equally sized chunks and have a majority vote. Signal corruption is a very rare occurrence and often occur in small bursts. So then it figures that it is even rarer to have a corrupted majority vote. As long as the corruption is not completely unpredictable (has a 50% chance of occurring) then signals can be repaired. Suppose we have a test set of 10 samples. The ground truth is all positive ("1?):

As robots become more life-like, questions have been raised about whether its morally acceptable to kick them, bully them or program them to kill. Taking this dilemma to the next level, researchers have studied how these machines make us feel, sexually and emotionally. Scientists programmed a human-shaped robot to ask volunteers to touch it in 13 different places. While some of these requests presented no difficulties, people were hesitant to touch'private' areas including the robot's'buttocks'. Scientists at Stanford University programmed a human-shaped robot (pictured left) to ask volunteers (pictured right) to touch it in 13 different places.

The rise of the robot writers is here. Computers are replacing human writers without you realising it. Hal just took my job. The Associated Press (AP) already uses them. These robot journalists don't need insurance or a pension, pay or annual leave – or even sleep. This lets publications react to unforeseen events such as earthquakes, in real time, without stirring a human hack from their slumbers.

The engineers at 1 Hacker Way trained their object recognition tech by feeding it millions of images as examples. This kind of machine learning is called neural network, and it was how Google taught AlphaGo the ancient game of Go and how one of our editors trained his computer to write Engadget articles. The team then made sure that alt text describes photos in a specific order, starting with (the number of) people, then objects and then scenes in the background. People tend to post mostly images on Facebook these days to the point that browsing the News Feed has become a very visual experience. Someone who can't see all those could feel excluded, but this technology could help "the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it."