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When robots take over the world, they may end up spouting the kind of quick-paced dialogue that makes Romance novels and thrillers the most popular genres among readers. The Guardian reports that Google has "swallowed" thousands of books to create artificial intelligence, including thrillers, romance novels, and other genres. Forster's thriller is just one of 11,000 novels that researchers including Oriol Vinyals and Andrew M Dai at Google Brain have been using to improve the technology giant's conversational style. After feeding these books into a neural network, the system was able to generate fluent, natural-sounding sentences. According to a Google spokesman – who didn't want to be named – products such as the Google app will be "much more useful if they can capture the nuance of language better".

Business travel's future will be packed with bots, artificial intelligence and inventive customer-facing tools that make journeys more pleasurable for corporate travelers. That's what Miriam Moscovici, BCD's director of Emerging Technologies, took away from DataArt's Travel Question Time, held recently in New York City. In a video interview after the event, Moscovici--one of Travel Question Time's panelists--predicted the industry's best innovations lie ahead. BCD has been doing a lot of foundational work to capitalize on some of the "exciting stuff" that's emerging, she said. "The whole concept of journey management is a sweet spot … especially for the travel management company," Moscovici said, adding TMCs have a unique understanding of businesses' requirements and expectations around travel consumption and spending.

Advanced analytics engines will likely require significant computing power. These systems and their CPUs will differ from traditional servers. An Intel x86 or IBM architecture may be supplemented by parallel graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD, or programmable logic chips from Altera or Xilinx within these engines. Universities and cloud vendors such as Google are the primary users. Big data, security, image identification, natural language processing and virtual reality may be among the target applications.

Instagram is completely down, leaving people unable to use either its app or website. Visitors to the website see a message reading "5xx server error" and nothing else. App users will see a message saying that the app "couldn't refresh feed" – though the problem looks temporary, it isn't actually possible to get new pictures at all. It isn't clear what the source of the problem is or if it will be fixed any time soon. Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

There's a proud tradition of "bedroom technology" that's meant to keep you up all night, but a new device from Hello has something else in mind. It's a smart sleep aid that you can control with your voice, like an Amazon Echo or Google Home. And it contains a surprising number of bells and whistles geared toward improving your shuteye. SEE ALSO: Use your iPhone's bedtime mode to get your sleep schedule on track Sense with Voice, as the device is called, is a new version of Hello's existing sleep gadget. It launched Tuesday, priced at $149.

The deluge of stories about artificial intelligence and robots has sparked a renewed interest in the capacity of machines to work better, smarter and longer than humans. Fuelled by the well-publicised examples of smart systems winning gameshows and trouncing a world-champion in the notoriously complex game of Go, many businesses are considering the potential of automation. But away from the speculation about the capabilities of near-future AI and robots, what are the practical considerations for any firm thinking of going down the automation route? The first rather obvious question for a business to ask is whether it is technically feasible to automate a particular activity, or will be in the near future, according to the consultancy McKinsey. This question shouldn't be drawn too broadly, and should focus on individual aspects of a person's role rather than their job in its entirety.

Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It's a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you've got small platforms that move fast and don't have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less? At the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, where they've been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. This kind of "it'll be fine" philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don't worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going.

Entry Point: Data - Using Python's sci-packages to prepare data for Machine Learning tasks and other data analyses [IPython nb]