Dr. Quoc Viet Le is a research scientist at Google Brain known for his path-breaking work on deep neural networks (DNN). He is especially famous for his Ph.D work in image processing under Andrew Ng, one of the pioneers of the DNN revolution. Le's and Ng's work demonstrated how computers could be used to learn complicated features and patterns in a way similar to how the mammalian brain learns, with better performance than earlier neural network technology. One of their first breakthroughs was demonstrating the training of a large neural network to detect cats from YouTube videos. This revolutionized the interest in DNNs, and got the current giants of the computer industry such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft in a race to incorporate AI techniques into their software.

It was the unspooling of an unfortunate series of events involving artificial intelligence, human nature, and a very public experiment. Amid this dangerous combination of forces, determining exactly what went wrong is near-impossible. But the bottom line is simple: Microsoft has awful lot of egg on its face after unleashing an online chat bot that Twitter users coaxed into regurgitating some seriously offensive language, including pointedly racist and sexist remarks. On Wednesday morning, the company unveiled Tay, a chat bot meant to mimic the verbal tics of a 19-year-old American girl, provided to the world at large via the messaging platforms Twitter, Kik and GroupMe. According to Microsoft, the aim was to "conduct research on conversational understanding."

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.

Human beings who design intelligent computers have a long history of getting those computers to beat other humans at games to prove how great their computers are. Think IBM's Deep Blue taking down chess legend Garry Kasparov, or the same company's Watson cleaning house on Jeopardy! But there is one game that artificial intelligence has long struggled to master: Go, a board game with roots in ancient China. Go players pick either black stones or white stones, with each player placing one stone of their color every turn. The idea is to capture and remove an opponent's stones by surrounding them with your own.

Twitter trolls made a dummy out of Microsoft's artificial intelligence chat robot, which learns through public interaction, by turning it into a pro-Nazi racist within a day of its launch. Tay, the artificial intelligence (AI) robot, had a bug in which it would at first repeat racist comments, then it began to incorporate the language in its own tweets. The tweets have been deleted, Tay has been paused, and Microsoft said it's "making some adjustments," the International Business Times reported. "Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you," Tay's information page states on Twitter.

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA. The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms. Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.

I know everybody thinks that artificial intelligence, the phenomenon, not the mediocre Steven Spielberg film, is going to be the end of humanity because it's going to become self-aware one day and decide to exterminate the human race. Well it turns out that A.I. will indeed want to kill humans, but only because we taught it to. This is the Twitter account of Tay, Microsoft's teen girl AI system that was supposed to learn how to speak like your average teenage girl. What was unique about Tay was that she was going to be taught entirely from her interactions with other people on the internet. It was an exercise Microsoft partook in to improve its customer service software as well as a huge PR opportunity.

A new report from The Information says Google is working on its own personal assistant hub, similar to Amazon's Echo. Only recently, through a series of updates and new hardware, has the Echo grown into a gadget worthy of its original transformative promise, and Google's apparently taken notice. Although details about the new product are light, we do know a few things: Google is supposedly working on an Echo competitor and has no working name for the product and may never even release it. But the idea makes almost too much sense. Google has the best voice recognition and search capabilities available, which also happens to be the Amazon Echo's greatest downfall: You can't perform a simple Google search on the Echo.

For human lip readers, context is key in deciphering words stripped of the full nuance of their audio cues. But a technology model for lip-reading developed at the University of East Anglia in the UK has been shown to be able to interpret mouthed words with a greater degree of accuracy than human lip readers, thanks to the application of machine learning tech to classify the visual aspect of sounds. And the kicker is the algorithm doesn't need to know the context of what you're discussing to be able to identify the words you're using. While the model remains a piece of research at this stage, there are scores of potential applications for technology that could automagically transform visual cues into accurate speech -- whether it's helping people who have audio impairments, or enhancing audio-less security video footage with additional speech data -- or even to try to figure out exactly what charged word one footballer spat at another in the heat of a match… Such a tech could also be applied as a fallback for poor audio quality on a mobile or video call. Or even perhaps to power a front-facing camera-based mobile'voice' assistant which you wouldn't actually have to speak to but could just discreetly mouth commands at (how cool would that be?).

The last few years have been quite active on many different fronts, such as technology, health, and the social scene. ID Labs is looking ahead to identify major emerging trends and how they impact different domains of present-day society. One of the rising trends that will change how we interact with our personal devices and visualize media is Virtual Reality. The basic concept of Virtual Reality is to view alternate realities in immersive 3D environments. Many big tech companies started the race of producing VR headsets, such as Sony, Samsung, Oculus (owned by Facebook), HTC, Google, and others.