Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week. The company released an official apology after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade, likening feminism to cancer and suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. Related: Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the disastrous experiment, Microsoft initially only gave a terse statement, saying Tay was a "learning machine" and "some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it."

Analytics is becoming critical in all part of our lives. Biostatistics has been a big driver of this analytics demand in the field of pharmaceuticals, biotech, health & medicine. Biostatistics (or biometry) is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology. The science of biostatistics encompasses the design of biological experiments, especially in medicine, pharmacy, agriculture and fishery; the collection, summarization, and analysis of data from those experiments; and the interpretation of, and inference from, the results. A major branch of this is medical biostatistics,[1] which is exclusively concerned with medicine and health.

A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, 'Bush did 9/11?-proclaiming Developers at Microsoft created'Tay', an AI modelled to speak'like a teen girl', in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as'The AI with zero chill' – and that she certainly is. To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe. She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being'creepy' or'super weird'.

Sometimes a correlation means absolutely nothing, and is purely accidental (especially when you compute millions of correlations among thousands of variables) or it can be explained by confounding factors. For instance, the fact that the cost of electricity is correlated to how much people spend on education, is explained by a confounding factor: inflation, which makes both electricity and education costs grow over time. This confounding factor has a bigger influence than true causal factors, such as more administrators / government-funded student loans boosting college tuition. Even when there is a correlation that can be leveraged to solve a problem, for example a drug that was found to be better than placebo to help with a medical condition, it may work well for some people, and not well for others: the correlation is not universally strong. Also, causation only matters in specific contexts such as root cause analysis, where you need to fix the cause.

Microsoft pulled its chatbot, Tay, just a day after launch. Tech giant Microsoft has apologised for unleashing an artificial intelligence called Tay onto the Twittersphere, after she learned how to tweet abusive, racist comments. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of research at Microsoft, in a blog post. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values." It didn't take long for Tay to learn the dark ways of the web.

If each atom in our universe were itself a universe, then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be about the same as the number of possible positions on the board in the ancient Chinese game of "Go." The game's complexity makes chess look like hopscotch. Until recently, the world's leading minds in artificial intelligence predicted that the world's smartest AIs--which have beat humans at chess by brute force for years now--were still a long, long way from "solving" Go. On March 12, a computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match against 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol and defeated him, 4-1, after Lee and other top professionals predicted he could win 5-0 or 4-1. AlphaGo, developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, has been awarded the rank of 9-dan, the highest possible professional Go ranking that takes human players decades to achieve.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

But then GoButler's algorithm technology started studying the way users interacted with heroes. Instead of keeping the human-enabled GoButler service (which would ultimately have required moving the support operation to a place like the Philippines) Hadzaad decided to double-down on the algorithmic-only offering of doing travel bookings exclusively. The idea of intellectual human labor as an unecessary luxury isn't just happening in concierge apps. "We can build machines that are optimized to that one task, and people are not optimized to one task.

Marketers use the word "handmade" to signal that a product is worth an extra couple bucks -- be it cheddar or loafer. But it's not just physical goods that are made more quickly and cheaply by machine. Artificial intelligence is making decisions that would previously be done by humans. In a new post, Fast Company's Sarah Kessler reports on the on-demand concierge startup GoButler, which just went from having humans handle requests to solely relying on algorithms. "My general view is that people will always want convenience, but they're not willing to pay premiums for it," says GoButler CEO Navid Hadzaad.

Amazon announced that Nest thermostats would support Alexa voice controls when it launched the Amazon Dot and Tap earlier his month. Like the Echo, the new devices will also control the Nest. Amazon has been working with multiple companies to make its Alexa platform a central part of the home. Nest has also been reaching out to other companies with Works with Nest system. So hopefully most of your connected home will work together in the near future.