I have to admit that when "Big Data" starting getting a lot of traction, I was not a fan of the phrase as I often work with organisations who do not think of themselves in terms of having a lot of data. We can talk all we want about the multiple dimensions of big data, commonly referred do as the "V's" (volume, variety, velocity and veracity) but what sticks is the term "Big Data" and that conjures up images for people, after all marketing is powerful tool! Even today, I often have discussions regarding how a specific customer can take advantage of the new capabilities introduced in the era of big data, regardless of the size of the data stored. There are many different genres of analytics available that can be utilised to extend your analytic capabilities. Three of the most common include graph analysis, path analysis and text analysis.

Google acquired Kifi, an app for collecting links from across the Internet, which teams could then collaborate on. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. The Kifi service and data will not become part of Google. The service will remain fully functional for existing users for a few more weeks, before its shut down. The company is no longer accepting new registrations. The team at Kifi will be joining the Spaces team at Google.

Editor's note: Dallas police actively guided an explosive-laden robot to kill gunman Micah Johnson when negotiations broke down after he opened fire on police and others July 7. This interview on Think -- which was recorded before the ambush took place -- focuses on the questions raised by computers and robots programmed to kill without human supervision. You may have seen it earlier this year when a company called Boston Dynamics posted a video of a humanoid robot that can walk on two legs, even over uneven terrain. Seeing a machine balance on bumpy, snowy ground in a New England forest is mesmerizing. But watching the robot get knocked to the ground by a human tester, then get up all by itself and keep going is somehow profoundly unsettling.

According to the American Cancer Society, cancer kills more than 8 million people each year. Early detection can boost survival rates. Researchers and clinicians are feverishly exploring avenues to provide early and accurate diagnoses, as well as more targeted treatments. Blood screenings are used to detect many types of cancers, including liver, ovarian, colon and lung cancers. Current blood screening methods typically rely on affixing biochemical labels to cells or biomolecules.

OK, let's drop autonomous vehicles for a second. This post is about creating a machine that writes its own code. More specifically, we are going to train a character level Long Short Term Memory neural network to write code itself by feeding it Python source code. The training will run on a GPU instance on EC2, using Theano and Lasagne. If some of the words here sound obscure to you, I will do my best to explain what is happening. This experiment is greatly inspired by this awesome blog post that I highly recommend reading.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Monday that chatbots will "fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced by everybody." Nadella explained that for now, bots will augment apps, but in time, human language will be taught to all computers and become "the new interface." "So pretty much everyone today who is building applications whether they be mobile apps or desktop apps or websites will build bots as the new interface, where you have a human dialogue interface versus menus of the past," he said. Nadella spoke onstage at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, an annual developer gathering in Toronto. He painted a similarly ambitious picture in April when Microsoft Bot Framework was launched at Build, Microsoft's annual developer conference.

I'm Paul Thornton, The Times' letters editor, and it is Saturday, July 16. How much more terrorism can France take? After yet another attack in that country -- this time in Nice, where a driver plowed a truck into a crowd of Bastille Day revelers -- at least 84 people are dead and authorities are busy gathering evidence to determine how it happened. But in the United States, some talking heads seem to possess answers that French investigators have yet to produce. Newt Gingrich, for example, called for government monitoring of mosques, a recommendation that earned him the scorn of The Times' editorial board: In the face of such a threat, people need leaders adept at analyzing data and thinking creatively about intelligence gathering and risk reduction.

Emerging Technology from the arXiv covers the latest ideas and technologies that appear on the Physics arXiv preprint server. It is part of the Physics arXiv Blog. Mojtaba Arvin is a computer programmer who's fascinated by artificial intelligence . Right now, he spends his time as an information technology student .

Algorithms have become a ubiquitous and essential part of business operations. Uber uses algorithms to determine customer demand and set pricing accordingly, while Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to nudge their customers to purchase a product or stream a new video they might like. And these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly, the use of these algorithms can not only increase an enterprise's internal efficiency, but often algorithmic software or machine learning algorithms can also be used to deepen consumer loyalty and trust. Viewers on Netflix trust algorithms to deliver content they'll enjoy, just as customers trust Amazon to offer only useful products for purchase.

Both the bookies and the pollsters predicted the outcome of the European Referendum incorrectly, but do you know who got it right? According to analysis from Pheme, of the 291,000 tweets where a vote was expressed, leave votes outnumbered remain significantly – and that's not even Pheme's main aim. Named after the Greek goddess of fame and rumours, the project, which began in 2014, is designed to assess online rumours, to help journalists determine what's true and what's made up. "Professor Rob Procter (now at Warwick) and I were discussing the manual analysis his team did with the Guardian on analysing rumours circulating during the England riots in 2011 – for example, that the London Eye was on fire," says Kalina Bontcheva, Professor of Text Analytics at the University of Sheffield, who works on Pheme. "My background is in automatic text analysis, so we discussed how rumour analysis and detection can be automated or, at least, support be offered to decision makers to help them with the process."