Today's post is from Sean McClure. Sean is the Director of Data Science at Space-Time Insight, a leading provider of advanced analytics software for organizations looking to leverage machine learning for their business applications. Having worked across diverse industries, and alongside many talented professionals, Sean has seen the blend of approaches required to convert raw data successfully into real world value. Sean's passion is working with cross-discipline teams to build the next generation of adaptive, data-driven applications. It would hardly be an overstatement to say we live in a software economy.

Talla the Task Assistant can be installed for free into a user's direct messages on Slack, which integrates with email and provides notifications and alerts from the task bot or other team members. Talla is also scheduled to be on Hipchat before the end of this year. After a brief overview, Talla prompts users to add a task and promises to send a reminder. Users can change settings on the task bot to get task reminders 24 hours before the due date, one hour before the due date and exactly when the task is due. At any time, users can ask Talla to show a task list, reschedule a task or mark it as done.

Join this webinar to be certain of making the right decisions on moving resources to the cloud. You'll see how to evaluate which workloads are candidates for cloud migration PLUS measure how efficiently you're utilizing your own resources. The CloudPhysics Cost Calculator for Private Cloud lets you apply basic costing models to determine your actual costs per virtual machine (VM) in terms of power, compute resources, memory, storage, licensing, and more to generate a cost baseline. See your "as is" costs beside your rightsized costs at peak, 99th percentile, and 95th percentile. Capture savings by reducing workloads to match actual demands and reduce overprovisioning.

Mark Zuckerberg is aiming to demonstrate his artificial intelligence project he was working on. Zuckerberg shared his plans during a live Facebook town hall Q&A session from Rome today. He said when someone asked about the side project, Mark Replied "I hope to have a demo, hopefully next month". Back in Jan, the Facebook chief revealed that as the part of his annual "Personal Challenge", he wanted to build an AI capable of controlling different things in his house like temperature, lighting etc. At the time, Zuckerberg is assuming it as Jarvis from Iron Man.

Zuckerberg says he hopes to have a demo of the project available sometime next month, and credits a lot of the AI's success to his engineering team at work. "It's awesome because I get to interact with all these Facebook engineers who are doing this awesome AI work in speech recognition, in face recognition," he says. "I programmed it so now, when I walk up to my door, my gate, I don't have to put in a code or something like that to get in -- put in a key -- it just sees my face and lets me in." Even so, the AI isn't quite ready for primetime: Zuckerberg says the house only responds to his own voice, much to his wife's disappointment. "I'll give her access once I'm done."

Tons of science fiction stories have shown artificial intelligence turning against us -- but Person of Interest has broken new ground in showing an A.I. takeover that most people don't even know is happening. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman tell io9 why their show's take on A.I. revolt is subtler than Skynet. Tonight's episode of Person of Interest is one of the most political the show has ever done, and it's also an intense, edge-of-your-seat thriller, in which we start to see the ambitions of Samaritan, the amoral artificial intelligence that came into being at the end of last season. As Nolan puts it, tonight we'll see "the connective tissue between Samaritan and the West Wing." We'll also see the way that the information that Samaritan offers is acted upon now by Control and her operatives.

Technology around us will provide an "augmented intelligence" that will help humans to make smarter decisions, improve business models and solve problems that were previously intractable. "The ways in which we are able to interact with computers is going to make people a lot more efficient and more effective, and build digital models." This, says Richard Paris, senior data scientist at KPMG New Zealand, is the future of digital. We are increasingly seeing the digital world interact in our everyday lives, says Paris, who spoke at the inaugural KPMG Technology Series in Auckland. People interact with smartphones and these devices are becoming our intelligent assistants.

Today, Facebook is announcing new recipients to the GPU Partnership Program announced earlier this year. This program, fashioned with the goal of helping others make faster progress in the field of AI, is intended to overcome a large challenge, ensuring the world's top researchers have the infrastructure, tools and techniques to solve some of the largest technical problems. To help accomplish this, we are distributing 22 high-powered GPU servers to 15 world-class research groups across 9 European countries. The Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team will also work with recipients to ensure they have the software required to run the servers as well as directly collaborate with them in their ongoing research efforts. FAIR is well known for its open research efforts, and the insights from the GPU program are intended to be shared with the global scientific community.

Robots and artificial intelligence have long posed a threat to humans' jobs, but a group of scientists on Sunday issued an especially dire warning about the impact of such machines. Several academics told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that further advances in automation could result in mass unemployment across a whole spectrum of industries, from transportation to sex work. Moshe Vardi, professor of computer science and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology Rice University, said that there are 250,000 industrial robots in the United States right now, and the growth rate is in the double digits. "We need to start thinking very seriously--what will humans do when machines can do almost everything?" "We have to redefine the meaning of good life without work."

Remember that artificial intelligence Mark Zuckerberg said he was going to build to control his house? It sounds like he actually made it -- and he's almost ready to show it to the public. "I got it to the point where I can control the lights, I can control the gates, I can control the temperature," he said at a Facebook Q&A in Rome this week. Zuckerberg says he hopes to have a demo of the project available sometime next month, and credits a lot of the AI's success to his engineering team at work. "It's awesome because I get to interact with all these Facebook engineers who are doing this awesome AI work in speech recognition, in face recognition," he says.