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."

During the company's Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft has unveiled its upcoming plans to provide online degrees that cater to the demands of highly competitive technological fields. Officially launched as the Microsoft Professional Degree (MPD) program, the first course offered to interested professionals and fresh graduates alike, mainly focuses on skill development and education through a Data Sciences curriculum. "Recognizing a shortage of qualified individuals to fill the growing need for data scientists, Microsoft consulted with education and industry partners to develop a curriculum concentrated on developing the skills and real world experience these new roles require," says Microsoft. This specific MPD program features courses that educate incoming applicants on how they can visualize and implement data in Microsoft Excel and Power BI, as well as supplemental (and needed) skills in R and Python programming language, statistics and machine learning. "At Microsoft, we believe the approach and tools used for learning need to continually evolve to meet the demands of our device-centric and data-driven world," said Alison Cunard, the general manager at Microsoft Learning Experiences.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.

Machines could put more than half the world's population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence's threat to the economy should not be understated. Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year. Hawking warned that AI "could spell the end of the human race" and Musk said it represents "our biggest existential threat". Related: 'Mini-brains' could revolutionise drug research and reduce animal use The fear of artificial intelligence has even reached the UN, where a group billing itself the Campaign to ...

You can watch the Azure ML tutorial video at the landing page to have a quick overview about the Azure ML service. This will open the page where we will develop our Azure ML experiments in the next labs.

Cloud adoption has increased massively in the past few years, and technology trends can only benefit IT managers. Speaking at the Rackspace Solve 2016 conference in London, Rackspace CTO John Engates, said that he is seeing large adoption, and this presents an opportunity to work with emerging technologies and analytics. In his opening talk "Experts in a multi-client world", Engates identified the two challenges of cloud adoption of a lack of resources and an expertise problem. "What we have now is end-users and consumers of websites and they connect to content management systems, digital platforms and mobile applications, but there is also internal challenges using CRM or email and that is what we have to deal with as IT managers," he said. "Also there are new challenges like Shadow IT and a lot going on there, and some challenges in heading to the cloud and you can pick up applications and move to the cloud. Some are on the journey or already there, or moving and that is where companies are starting."