Microsoft introduced a chat robot designed to interact in the style of a "teen girl" on Twitter, and it went rogue almost immediately, spouting racist opinions, conspiracy theories and a fondness for genocide. The artificial intelligence (AI) named "Tay" - @Tayandyou on Twitter - was intended chat to with 18-24 year olds with the idea being that she would learn from each tweet and get progressively smarter. Clearly Microsoft had forgotten that Twitter is home to a huge amount of trolls, racists and general troublemakers who jumped at the chance to'teach' the teenaged AI about life. In one widely circulated tweet, Tay said: "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. She also went on to deny the existence of the Holocaust, and agreed with white supremacist propaganda that was tweeted at her. Microsoft apparently didn't put any kind of filters on the AI, which meant Tay was able to tweet a number of atrocious racial slurs. The troublesome cyber-teen has since been taken offline for'upgrades' and Microsoft has deleted some of her more offensive tweets. "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement.

For decades robots have won the affection of humans in pop culture -- whether it was R2-D2 in Star Wars or Rosie the Robot in the Jetsons. But as popular as these machines have been on screen, we haven't seen similar robots enter our everyday lives. Now that appears on the verge of changing as the technology sector increasingly invests in robotics. Funding to private robotics companies doubled in 2015 to reach a record high of 587 million, according to CB Insights. And robots were the dominant theme at a conference Amazon held earlier this week to encourage inspiration and creativity in tech's hottest fields.

Reinforcement learning, a key Google DeepMind algorithm, could overhaul news recommendation engines and greatly improve users' stickiness. After beating a Go Grandmaster, the algorithm could become the engine of choice for true personalization. My interest for DeepMind goes back to its acquisition by Google, in Jan. 2014, for about half a billion dollars. Later in California, I had conversations with artificial intelligence and deep learning experts; they said Google had in fact captured about half of the world's best A.I. minds, snatching several years of Stanford A.I. classes, and paying top dollar for talent. Acquiring London startup DeepMind was a key move in a strategy aimed at cornering the A.I. field.

When Microsoft unleashed Tay, an artificially intelligent chatbot with the personality of a flippant 19-year-old, the company hoped that people would interact with her on social platforms like Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. The idea was that by chatting with her you'd help her learn, while having some fun and aiding her creators in their AI research. The good news: people did talk to Tay. She quickly racked up over 50,000 Twitter followers who could send her direct messages or tweet at her, and she's sent out over 96,000 tweets so far. The bad news: in the short time since she was released on Wednesday, some of Tay's new friends figured out how to get her to say some really awful, racist things.

Yahoo is today announcing the release of a large-scale data set that describes people's usage of news feeds on several of the company's web services, including Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The idea is to empower machine learning researchers in academia with very rich data. The release of data is not, in and of itself, new for Yahoo -- there have been 56 previous releases in the Yahoo Labs Webscope program, which encompasses advertising, image, social, and ratings data, among other categories. This data set in particular covers 20 million people over the course of four months in 2015, and shows the types of devices people used to visit pages, how far down they got in the articles, and the top subjects of articles. There is data on people's locations, their ages (in some cases), and their gender -- all in an anonymized way. What's interesting about today's release is the size of the data set: 13.5TB.

I'm guessing this library will get the most use in inference. For that you'll want to implement the 2x2 and 4x4 winograd transforms. These can break a single input image into enough tiles to get you decent batched gemm performance. The smaller tiles have much higher accuracy as well, and even work fine in fp16 or int16. Also I suspect your muti-image winograd implementation can be optimized quite a bit more than it is.

Empowering the data-driven organization is a core element of our strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This can sound like just another fancy marketing campaign – unless you were in a seat at the Seize the Data Analytics World Tour event in Palo Alto. DreamWorks Animation's Jeff Wike presenting at the Silicon Valley event As I sat smiling through the Kung Fu Panda 3 trailer and watched Jeff Wike, Head of Technology for Film and TV Production at DreamWorks Animation, take the stage, I expected to hear how analytics helped DreamWorks Animation analyze how many people watched the film and how they chose to do so - in the theater, on demand, on what device. That information is foundational to any organization in the media industries these days. I didn't expect to hear that the HPE Vertica Advanced Analytics database improved the ability of artists to iterate design and even render panda fur by minimizing compute resources, or how the studio was able to quickly redesign the characters' facial movements when the movie was translated to Mandarin, also due to the power of analytics.

Vinith Misra is one of the funnier people in tech. As a consultant for the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, he's best known for having crafted a mathematically complex dick joke. At IBM, where he works full-time on Watson, part of his job is to figure out how to give a robot a sense of humor. AI "is not about replacing humans, but interacting with them," Misra told me. "That's where humor is super valuable." We're going to be interacting with machines more and more, as robots and smart devices enter our homes, offices, cars, schools, hospitals and workplaces.

In a moment that will surely be cited by future cyborg historians to explain why the polluting influence of human beings had to be eliminated in order to achieve digital Nirvana, Microsoft has aborted its most recent chat-bot experiment after the artificial teen turned into a foul-mouthed, anti-Semitic Trump supporter within 24 hours of her creation. The Telegraph traces the brief online life of "Tay" (@TayandYou on Twitter), an AI chat bot designed to replicate the speech patterns of teenage girls. "The AI with zero chill," as Microsoft called her, was programmed to be self-conscious and shy, like Kanye West and Taylor Swift, and use "millennial slang," and her stated purpose was to help Microsoft improve the customer service on its voice-recognition software. Naturally, the cesspool of human thought that is Twitter hated her on principle. For that reason--and because it was honestly pretty funny--various users started chatting with Tay about the purity of the white race and how cool Hitler was in order to fill her empty data coffers with hot garbage she could then innocently spit back into the void.

Edit: As pointed out in the comments my initial claim that it beats the winning solution turned out to be false. The prize was judged on a dataset that was set in a future time as compared to the training set. If you are familiar with the Netflix prize challenge, you would remember the final solution that got the 1M prize.. It was a mix of solutions from a few winning teams and probably was not the most elegant of solutions. There were some reports that Netflix did not use the final solution.