Recently, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Obama spoke of redesigning the social compact and starting a conversation around fair wages. He cited teachers as being underpaid, and called for a reexamination of what we value, and what we'll pay for. Obama addressed basic income, a proposal for all citizens to receive a government stipend in order to meet their costs of living. The idea has gained recent support among some futurists and economists, given concerns over how technology will eliminate jobs and impact salaries in coming years. "Whether a universal income is the right model -- is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people? Related: Is Uber's push for self-driving cars a job killer? A 2013 Oxford study concluded that 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being handled by machines over perhaps a decade or two. Some experts fear we're headed toward mass unemployment. Truck drivers, cab drivers and deliveryman are the most prominent example of those at risk. The tech and car industries are currently pouring billions into self-driving vehicle technology. Businesses have long embraced automation because it lowers their costs and improves profits. But advances in technology are expected to broadly expand the jobs that automated machines can handle. Of course, most Americans once worked on farms. Our country has survived transitions before. Yet experts caution this revolution in how we work could unfold much quicker, making it more difficult and unpleasant. "Oh, we survived the Industrial Revolution, sure we did.

The BMW Motorrad VISION NEXT 100 concept motorcycle is unveiled in Santa Monica, Calif., on the last of four international stops of BMW's tour into its next 100 years. The motorcycle is self balancing. But looking deeper, saying that it wants to imagine the company a century from now, BMW's leaders are focused on robotic cars, electric power, new and recycled materials replacing steel and radically new manufacturing techniques, including those that would enhance its manufacturing footprint in the U.S., where the factory in Spartanburg, S.C., is on its way to becoming the company's largest. The German automaker brought its Vision Next 100 presentation to an airport hangar here this week after several stops around the world to talk about what it sees in the future and to and show off four prototype vehicles, including a new self-balancing motorcycle in which riders never need to put their feet down. No matter how people choose to transport themselves, BMW says it wants to be a leader at the high end of the market.

Who within organizations should be responsible for robotics security? Today's security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now be millions -- or even billions -- of dollars at risk when information security isn't handled properly. As robotics becomes increasingly intertwined with other facets of IT such as the cloud, mobile devices, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), concerns about the risk of data theft and other negative impacts are legitimate. But the security issue goes beyond traditional risks such as the loss or theft of information or the interruption of services.

DeepMind's latest AI has a "working memory" so that it can learn how to solve tasks for itself – such as how best to get from A to B on the London tube network. "The thing can learn to compute what it has to, rather than being programmed," says Murray Shanahan at Imperial College, London, who wasn't involved with the work. Called a Differentiable Neural Computer (DNC), the system succeeds because it combines neural networks, which are good at learning but not so good at storing data, with an external memory. It can retrieve items from its memory in the order they were recorded – a key innovation that ensures they don't get overwritten too quickly and helps the system tackle complicated data it hasn't seen before. The DNC works out how to interpret a data set on its own, following some basic training on random graphs.

British lawmakers want more transparency and less bias in decision-making -- not their own, of course, but in decisions made by AI systems. As more and more software systems and connected devices employ artificial intelligence technologies to make decisions for their owners, the lawmakers want to know what's behind their thinking. The U.K. Parliament's Science and Technology Committee has been studying the need for more regulation in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Recent advances in AI technology raise a host of social, ethical and legal questions, the committee's members said in a report published Wednesday. We need, they said, to think about whether transparency in decisions made by AI systems is important; whether it's possible to minimise bias being accidentally built into them; and how we might verify that such technology is operating as intended and will not lead to unwanted or unpredictable behaviors.

Before assessing R and Python, I will start with Wolfram Mathematica. You can handle lists and matrices easily, you have all the best mathematical functions, backup of Wolfram Alpha and extremely sophisticated graphics visualizations, that allow you, for instance, to make and visualize an animated gradient descent, animate different weights for a given neural network, choose a specific Machine Learning algorithm and automatically classify your dataset in classes, plot stunning 3D visualizations, make animations and manipulate variables values dynamically at the same time you see the output of your calculation. It has 4.65 Gb size and comes with all libraries integrated. It's a great program when you know the formulae for Machine Learning algorithms, so you can build them from scratch, in a completely customized way. You can also do face recognition, geolocation of objects with 3D plots of map surface, handle cellular automata like any other and develop social networks models with artificial intelligence completely customized.

TensorFlow is an open-source library from Google developed for creating deep learning models. Please fill out the following form so that the printable cheat sheet can be sent to you via e-mail.

If you're like many people, you have thousands of photos on your phone, long forgotten after you've posted a few on Instagram or Facebook. They don't have to stay forgotten. Apple and Google are both applying a form of artificial intelligence called "machine learning" to organize your pictures and video -- and along the way, help you rediscover last year's vacation, dinner with close friends and a casual summer outing to the park. Apple's tools are part of last month's iOS 10 system update for iPhones and iPads. The Google Photos app for Apple and Android devices has a digital assistant to automatically organize these memories -- and Google signaled last week that it will only get smarter.

We're going to be blunt: Chatbots in their current form aren't great. We were promised bots that would change the way we interact with businesses and services, but instead we have interactive bots that perform worse than apps. They are primarily focused on taps or interactive graphical interfaces, and conversing with them using natural language is nearly impossible. Take an example of Poncho Weather on Facebook Messenger. Let's say I'm going to a conference next Monday in San Diego and want to know what the forecast is.