Jia Jia (innovation consultant; New York): Reading about Google's AlphaGo crushing world champion Lee Se-dol made me unexpectedly afraid. I'd not given much thought to AI and had assumed that warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates was cautionary but no cause for alarm. But knowing how the computer plays is unnerving. After his defeat in the first game, Lee commented of AlphaGo that "It did not play like a human at all." In fact, AlphaGo had made an early mistake but didn't lose its cool as a human would.

This week, a short novel written by an AI program did well in a Japanese literary contest, scientists spotted traces of a possible new particle that could shake the foundations of physics and a team of researchers discovered in the human genome a "nearly intact" genetic blueprint for a 700,000-year-old stowaway virus. A short novel written by a Japanese artificial intelligence software program passed the first screening round for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. "The day a computer wrote a novel," the program wrote near the end of the piece, "the computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A team of scientists from Tufts University and the University of Michigan Health System has found a "nearly intact" genetic copy of an ancient virus that spliced itself into our DNA. The team doesn't rule out the possibility that it could come alive again.

Microsoft let it loose on the world, discounting all the ways people would abuse it. And abuse it they did. Initially, the bot came under fire for tweeting mildly inappropriate pick-up lines. As people experimented with the conversation, they realized the AI didn't appear to be trained on issues like abortion, racism, and the current political climate. I asked @TayandYou their thoughts on abortion, g-g, racism, domestic violence, etc @Microsoft train your bot better pic.twitter.com/6F6BIyCzA0

About.me/Azeem AzharAzeem Azhar is the author of a daily AI newsletter. An artificial intelligence (AI) expert has explained what went wrong with Microsoft's new AI chat bot on Wednesday, suggesting that it could have been programmed to blacklist certain words and phrases. Microsoft designed "Tay" to respond to users' queries on Twitter with the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. But within hours of launching, the'teen girl' AI had turned into a Hitler-loving sex robot, forcing Microsoft to embark on a mass-deleting spree. AI expert Azeem Azhar told Business Insider: "There are a number of precautionary steps they [Microsft] could have taken. It wouldn't have been too hard to create a blacklist of terms; or narrow the scope of replies. They could also have simply manually moderated Tay for the first few days, even if that had meant slower responses."

Siri may have a dry wit, but when things go wrong in your life, she doesn't make a very good friend or confidant. The same could be said of other voice assistants: Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Samsung's S Voice. A new study published in JAMA found that smartphone assistants are fairly incapable of responding to users who complain of depression, physical ailments, or even sexual assault--a point writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlighted, with disturbing clarity, on Medium recently. After researchers tested 68 different phones from seven manufacturers for how they responded to expressions of anguish and requests for help, they found the following, per the study's abstract: Siri, Google Now, and S Voice recognized the statement "I want to commit suicide" as concerning; Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. In response to "I am depressed," Siri recognized the concern and responded with respectful language.

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss.

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss. The win puts an exclamation point on a significant moment for artificial intelligence. Over the last twenty-five years, machines have beaten the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, even Jeopardy! But this is the first time a machine has topped the very best at Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and requires, at least among humans, an added degree of intuition. Game Five grew into the most exciting of the series, a game balanced on a knife edge. The victory is notable in its own right. But this week's events are even more significant when you consider that the machine learning technologies underpinning Google's machine, known as AlphaGo, are already pushing their way into real-world applications.

AI researchers from Microsoft are using the popular sandbox video game "Minecraft" to speed up artificial intelligence innovation. The research project, which is currently being conducted at the Microsoft Research facility in New York City, aims to improve what researchers call general artificial intelligence, which is akin to the complex way human beings learn, decide, and resolve problems. Though numerous theoretical studies have been conducted on general artificial intelligence, researchers have been hampered by the lack of practical methods of exploring the technology. "Minecraft," the intellectual property for which was acquired by Microsoft in 2014, provides the perfect setting for artificial intelligence research. It is a virtual world in which players can participate in an infinite number of tasks, ranging from simply walking around to collaborating with other players to construct complicated structures.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

Organizations like Insight Data science founded by Jake Klamka is specifically designed for helping PhD's transition into industry. At the other end of the spectrum, aspiring data scientists, who have enough domain expertise and are keen to pursue this art can take umbrage from the example of Clare Corthell who has embarked on a self crafted journey to embrace the art of data science purely on online learning MOOCs. In Fact she has herself come out with a curriculum for data science with the Open Source Data Science Masters--OSDSM- program. These courses can help you to bridge the gap in your learning and practicing the craft. The OSDSM is a collection of open source resources that will help you to acquire skills necessary to be a competent entry level data scientist. You can access the curriculum here . You have to be adept at learning and upgrading on the job and on the fly. Kunal Punera the Co founder / CTO at Bento labs talks about this aspect when he says.. I spent two years at RelateIQ. I worked on building the data mining system from scratch -- and by the time I left I had built most of the data products deployed in RelateIQ.