Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a new LiveMessage service that's aimed at connecting his company's Service Cloud with messaging services like Facebook Messenger and SMS. Benioff is pitching the new service as a way to turn messaging apps into a user interface for Salesforce, in addition to serving as a tool for connecting people with their friends. It will power bots, in addition to direct communications between service representatives and customers. Right now, LiveMessage works with SMS, and it will be expanded to work on Facebook Messenger later this year.

First generation virtual reality may have nailed sense of presence, but one major limitation keeps it from feeling truly immersive: Walking. The endless landscapes of the digital world are hampered by the confines of reality -- your playspace is only so big, and if you walk too far in any given direction, you're going to hit a wall. Most games get around this with teleportation mechanics, allowing the player's avatar to jump to far-off locations. Ready at Dawn Studios' Lone Echo took another approach: turn off the gravity, and eliminate the need to walk altogether. Lone Echo casts the player as Jack, an artificially intelligent robot who helps astronauts run and maintain a space station that orbits Saturn. It's the perfect environment for a game trying to sidestep limitations of VR's walking problem: with no gravity, there's no need to walk.

Edward Snowden appears from Russia to people in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2014. SAN FRANCISCO -- The Edward Snowden effect just made an encore, thanks to a report Yahoo has been scanning incoming emails on behalf of U.S. intelligence officials. And it's likely to take a few more bows. U.S. technology companies, already in defensive mode thanks to the former NSA contractor's revelations of a mass government surveillance program in 2013, are even more data-hungry today and therefore more on edge. From big data to the cloud to artificial intelligence you can talk to in your kitchen, the tech world is busy spinning the straw of information it gathers about users into gold.

Machine learning is on the rise due to the technological convergence of the growth of big data, decreasing data storage costs, increasing computing power, improved artificial intelligence algorithms and acceleration of cloud computing. Machine learning is the ability for computers to learn without explicit programming. It's analogous to the human ability to identify an octopus based on the set of data input that goes to the brain, such as eight arms, tentacles, lack of skeleton and other characteristics, without having prior knowledge of every type of cephalopod mollusk in existence. However, human decision-making is subject to numerous cognitive biases that can easily distort judgement. For example, iconoclastic author Tom Peters highlights 159 cognitive biases that impact management decision-making (Peters, Tom.

If you're a transgender political activist located in the small mountainous kingdom of Nepal, how do you get your story out to the global community? Well if your name is Bhumika Shrestha, you use some of the most advanced information technologies from IBM, Google, Facebook, and Amazon to create a web platform for talking to the world. Bhumika is a political activist who has been working to advance to cause of transgender rights and cultural acceptance in Nepal and worldwide. Last year, she became the first transgender woman to travel abroad using the designation of "other" as her gender. Nepal is one of the few countries to allow such a classification on its passports.

In a new initiative, UK-based PC systems maker and retailer Scan 3XS is providing remote access to Nvidia DGX-1 Deep Learning Supercomputers. To allow customers to decide whether the significant investment involved in acquiring a DGX-1 is for them, Scan has begun a DGX-1 Proof of Concept program to allow end users to run custom data processing tests on one of its own deep learning machines. As a reminder, the Nvidia DGX-1 is headlined as'The World's First AI Supercomputer' by Nvidia. This compact 3U 19in rackmount purpose-built system, made for deep learning and AI accelerated analytics, is said to provide performance equivalent to 250 conventional servers. If you have access to a DGX-1 you get fully integrated hardware, deep learning software, development tools, and the ability to run popular accelerated analytics applications.

Google is leading the way in the global race to create human-level artificial intelligence, according to leading AI expert Nick Bostrom. Speaking at the IP Expo conference in London on Wednesday, October 5, Bostrom said that there are several companies and organizations that are currently focused on developing human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence. "There are different bets on what approach [to developing human-level AI] is most promising, and since we don't know what approach will ultimately work, there is some uncertainty there," Bostrom said in response to a question from Newsweek . "Baidu, Open AI, and all the large tech companies have various kinds of AI efforts that if they were to become specifically directed to this aim, they have a lot of resources." When pushed to back just one company that is currently leading the field, Bostrom said that Google's DeepMind was the clear frontrunner.

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic.

Samsung Electronics has agreed to buy Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence startup created by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Chris Brigham. You may not have heard of Kittlaus, Cheyer, or Brigham, but if you own an iPhone you've probably spoken with one of their creations: Siri. Apple bought their first startup, a spinoff from SRI International, in 2010. A couple of years later, they left to create Viv. Samsung's move into AI could be seen as a reaction to Google's launch of a new AI assistant on its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones on Tuesday.

Tech billionaires' latest obsession -- outside of suing websites into oblivion and attending odd, expensive festivals in the desert -- is apparently one that gripped the country in 1999. The good news: According to a New Yorker story this week, a couple of tech billionaires are secretly funding research to break us out. Jokes aside, the idea is called the simulation hypothesis and it's growing in popularity with the Silicon Valley nouveau-riche, as well as in idiosyncratic corners of Reddit. The New Yorker piece by Tad Friend was centered on Sam Altman, CEO of the "startup accelerator" Y Combinator, but took a detour into Matrix territory. Wrote Friend: "Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation."