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.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot named Tay. It is aimed at 18 to-24-year-olds and is designed to improve the firm's understanding of conversational language among young people online. But within hours of it going live, Twitter users took advantage of flaws in Tay's algorithm that meant the AI chatbot responded to certain questions with racist answers. These included the bot using racial slurs, defending white supremacist propaganda, and supporting genocide. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot aimed at 18 to 24-year-olds to improve their understanding of conversational language among young people online.

Artificial Intelligence became a hot topic earlier this year when suddenly all the heads of big tech firms were voicing their opinions around it. A movie called Ex-Machina helped contribute to the debate around AI as it demonstrated how a robot could gain so much human intelligence that it was able to manipulate humans and escape from their control. Understandably it prompted both excitement and concern. Similarly the Matrix films portrayed humans as believing they exist while actually living in an artificial or simulated world. It is thanks to popular science fiction films that our understanding of AI has grown.

Tom Popomaronis is the founder and CEO of OpiaTalk. Have you tried the Quartz News app, yet? Imagine a text conversation with a bot that sends you a news topic. You're then presented with two choices: Either tap a string of relevant (and surprisingly entertaining) emojis, which is like pressing "learn more," or tap an "anything else?" button to have another topic served: If you opt for the emojis, the app sends 1-3 follow-on texts that provide a high-level summary of the story and link to the article. If you're lucky, you'll even see a pertinent and entertaining gif in the mix for added value. When it comes to news apps in general, I like to scroll through a daily aggregator feed I've personalized to my liking; I usually don't want someone else telling me which news stories to pay attention to -- especially not one at a time.

Over a year ago, following an original presentation at MLConf, I wrote a blog post entitled "10 Lessons Learned from building ML systems". At that point, I was leading the Algorithms Engineering team at Netflix and those lessons reflected lessons we had learned there over the last few years. When you do a post/presentation like that, you don't really know how it is going to be received. Some things might be obvious to many while others might be controversial and some will not agree. It turns out though that it was very well received and referenced elsewhere (e.g.

You may know Watson for its ability to dominate Jeopardy, but did you know it has impressive movie skills too? IBM has hinted at Watson's movie-watching capabilities, like in its commercial with film director Ridley Scott, but we've never seen it in practice. So we asked Watson to tell us what it thought of the "Harry Potter" original book series and movies -- and the results are really interesting. By analyzing written text, Watson can identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. It can also analyze written text to assess personality traits based on the Big Five test, one of the most common, preferred ways psychologists use to measure personality.