The next time you chat with someone on Cisco Systems' Spark messaging service, that someone may not be a co-worker -- or even a person. Welcome to the world of bots. On Monday at the Cisco Live conference, Cisco said it's working with the messaging company Gupshup so more developers can bring their bots into Spark. It also introduced a partnership with Api.ai, a natural-language software company, in part to help developers build interfaces where users can just talk to bots. Bots aren't brand-new to Spark, but Gupshup prides itself on its chat-bot development platform, which is designed to make it easy to build bots and make them available through popular communications channels. The list already includes Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Slack.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 3.69 % breached securities laws by failing to disclose a fatal crash in May involving an electric car that was driving itself, a person familiar with the matter said, heightening scrutiny of how the Silicon Valley company handled the information. The May 7 accident killed the driver, Joshua Brown, a 40-year old Tesla owner who collided with an 18-wheel semi-truck that pulled in front of him on a Florida highway. Tesla alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. car-safety regulator, to the crash and investigated to determine whether the car was using the company's Autopilot system, which lets cars drive themselves under certain circumstances. But Tesla didn't disclose the crash to investors in a securities filing. The car-safety agency opened an investigation into the Autopilot technology.

The first thing you have to know is to how the machine learning impact on the digital marketing is all about machine learning. Yes, machine learning is not similar to the artificial intelligence and it develops the different capabilities to solve the general problems that occur in the digital marketing with effective machine learning strategy in solving the issues. Machine learning enhances the digital marketing strategy with the data flow. The marketers can leverage the ability of the machine learning technology as many basic versions have already used for years. Bow marketers are exploring the various ways for the sophisticated strategy for the digital marketing today.

Microsoft is using the video game Minecraft to help develop artificial intelligence (AI) which can complete complex tasks, and is opening up the research to the general computing public, according to a Monday announcement. Minecraft has been used by the tech company and several academic computer scientists to help develop sophisticated general artificial intelligence, or AI, which can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. Microsoft has opened up the project to the general computing public via an open-source license. "Minecraft is very close to the real world in many ways," Jose Hernandez-Orallo, who is a professor at the Technical University of Valencia and has used the system to work on AI, wrote in a press statement. "There are so many possibilities."

It's a privilege to have Rama Akkiraju, IBM distinguished engineer and master inventor, participate as a Vision and Opportunity panelist at the 2016 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. I organize the symposium – this year's event takes place July 12 in New York – and recognize the many ways IBM has, over the years, expanded what's possible in the realm of what I'd characterize as "human data." "My team at IBM has been focused on developing technology to better understand people at a deeper level based on sentiment, emotion, attitude, and personality," said Rama. "With our work with Watson APIs – such as Tone Analyzer, Personality Insights, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis – we're working to enable more compassion, engagement, and personalization in conversations across various channels." IBM's Marie Wallace, a 2014 sentiment symposium speaker, relates in a blog article that she "joined IBM in 2001 to build the next generation of NLP technology for IBM… the 3rd generation of IBM LanguageWare, which initially started back in the '80s." And I wrote, myself, in a 2008 InformationWeek article, BI at 50 Turns Back to the Future, about 1950s work by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn on the creation of business intelligence via text analysis.

When Joshua Brown switched on the Autopilot feature of his Tesla Model S on May 7, he would have been warned not to trust it. "Always keep your hands on the wheel. Be prepared to take over at any time," says the standard warning presented when Autopilot is turned on. But later that day Brown was killed when his car drove itself into the side of a semi-trailer that Autopilot had not detected. Federal investigations into the crash by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) may now question whether Tesla's design asks too much of drivers.

There are two kinds of office work: the uninspiring, but necessary stuff that takes long hours to do and requires little in terms of judgement or emotional intelligence; and the creative part, which is challenging and flexes the human mind. Software bots have already started to take on some of the routine tasks. We believe that within a decade, Artificial Intelligence will take care of all the repetitive office work so that we can focus our minds on higher value and rewarding activity. AI goes way beyond automation; it brings intelligence to the job at hand, with a truly transformational impact. The news that chatbots are coming to Facebook Messenger made quite a few waves.

Priyadharshini writes on Project Management, IT, Six Sigma, & e-Learning. With a penchant for writing and a passion for professional education & development, she is adept at penning educative articles. She was previously associated with Oxford University Press and Pearson Education, India.

Google acquires another machine learning startup, predictive analytics and wearables are driving the continued adoption of electronic health records (EHR), millennials are believers in the value of data-driven projects, Alteryx has released a new set of capabilities for its analytics platform, and H2O.ai has released an updated API for Apache Spark. The self-service data analytics company has added a new set of enhancements to the Alteryx Analytics platform. Among them is the ability to create models that progress from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive analytics. Alteryx said that this lets users evaluate possible alternatives and predict outcomes through simulation analysis. Other new capabilities include predictive modeling support for users working inside Teradata data warehouses with in-database analytics.

Having installed the public beta of macOS Sierra, I am staggered by this - it's not image recognition of a photo that finds a building in it, or something like that. I have some 27,000 photos and videos in my library - I was curious to see if it would find images of birds - so that's what I typed in to the search box. While I was doing that it made two suggestions - birds and birdhouse. Out of curiosity I clicked the birdhouse one. There are two things in there - a photo and a video.