In March, Microsoft revealed that it was using the open-world game Minecraft to train AI agents to learn how to do things like climbing a hill. The company also promised to make it available to the public so they could work on their own artificial intelligence projects and research, and it's finally available today. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) is a Minecraft mod that works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and supports just about any programming language you might want to use. So yes, that means you will need to know how to code – but Microsoft says that even novice programmers can get in on the action. You can learn more about Project Malmo here and grab the mod from this GitHub repository to try it for yourself.

Over the past year, artificial intelligence has made big headlines for everything from Siri's new capabilities to smart assistants. Although A.I. technologies like self-driving cars may be more thrilling, there is one innovation that hits close to home for all of us: chatbots. Chatbots provide companies with a novel way of engaging with customers, one that is as imminently promising as it is potentially harmful to the customer experience. As more companies begin to incorporate A.I. and autonomous systems into their operations, we are about to see a massive uptick in the usage of these types of bots. In fact, we already are. So how do we find the right mix of bot and human in order to maintain the highest level of customer service?

WIRE)--International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a 2016 IDC Innovators report recognizing pioneering players in the machine learning-based text analytics market. IDC Innovators are companies with under 50M in revenue that offer an inventive technology and/or groundbreaking new business model. Kira Systems, Loop AI Labs, NetBase, and Taste Analytics were all named as IDC Innovators in the machine learning-based text analytics market for 2016. "Organizations are continually looking to improve their handling of data, especially unstructured data, given the explosion of information that is available via the Internet today," said David Schubmehl, Research Director, IDC's Content Analytics, Discovery and Cognitive Systems research. "Understanding and utilizing this human-generated data is a significant challenge for most organizations and the use of machine learning based text analytics is rapidly becoming the best approach to dealing with this type of data."

I did a webcast earlier today about Bayesian statistics. Some time in the next week, the video should be available from O'Reilly. In the meantime, you can see my slides here: And here's a transcript of what I said: Thanks everyone for joining me for this webcast. At the bottom of this slide you can see the URL for my slides, so you can follow along at home. I'm Allen Downey and I'm a professor at Olin College, which is a new engineering college right outside Boston. Our mission is to fix engineering education, and one of the ways I'm working on that is by teaching Bayesian statistics. Bayesian methods have been the victim of a 200 year smear campaign. If you are interested in the history and the people involved, I recommend this book, The Theory That Would Not Die.

The Home Depot Product Search Relevance competition challenged Kagglers to predict the relevance of product search results. Over 2000 teams with 2553 players flexed their natural language processing skills in attempts to feature engineer a path to the top of the leaderboard. In this interview, the second place winners, Thomas (Justfor), Sean (sjv), Qingchen, and Nima, describe their approach and how diversity in features brought incremental improvements to their solution. Thomas is a pharmacist, with his PhD in Informatics and Pharmaceutical Analytics and works in Quality in the pharmaceutical industry. At Kaggle he joined earlier competitions and got the Script of the Week award.

The idea of having sex with a robot might seem more like something out of a science fiction film, but one in five of us are now open to the idea, according to new research. A recent survey found 21 per cent of British people would have sex with a droid, and one in three would go on a date. It comes as a leading expert on future technology claims human-on-robot sex will be more common than human-on-human sex by 2050. The survey was done VoucherCodesPro who asked 2,816 sexually active Brits aged 18 to describe which activities they would then carry out with a cyborg. Researchers asked those participants who said they would have sex with a robot why they would do it.

The Sunway TiahuLight machine is the fastest supercomputer in the world running on the 10 million-core with a peak of 125 petaflops. The TaihuLight supercomputer is being harnessed for some interesting work on deep neural networks. What is fascinating here is that currently, the inference side of such workloads can scale to many processors, but the training side is often scale-limited hardware and software-wise. Fu described an ongoing project on the Sunway TaihuLight machine to develop an open source deep neural network library and make the appropriate architectural optimization for both high performance and efficiency on both the training and inference parts of deep learning workloads. "Based on this architecture, we can provide support for both single and double precision as well as fixed point," he explains.

I trained an LSTM Recurrent Neural Network (a deep learning algorithm) on the first four Harry Potter books. I then asked it to produce a chapter based on what it learned. He looked like Madame Maxime. When she strode up the wrong staircase to visit himself. "I'm afraid I've definitely been suspended from power, no chance -- indeed?" said Snape.

Drone technology is developing so quickly--and morphing into commercial uses never before contemplated--that aviation regulators are having trouble keeping pace. Air-safety authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have acknowledged that traditional rule making is too slow and rigid to cope with the rapidly expanding applications of the flying machines, from bridge inspections to land surveys to news photography. And the pressure to spell out exactly what's allowed and what isn't is growing as the industry booms. Millions of hobbyists already operate drones, and over the next few years businesses are projected to begin flying millions more in the U.S. alone. Now regulators are scrambling to draft new, more-nimble rules and procedures.

During his company's first-quarter earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said delivering artificial intelligence and machine learning as cloud services to enterprise customers "is going be a huge source of differentiation for us." "We are at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off," Pichai told financially grounded Wall Street investors. Google, Mountain View, Calif., is engineering solutions that can enable services partners to help customers use machine learning to understand their data, he said. A couple of weeks later, at Google's I/O developers' conference, Pichai revealed a new custom chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, that will power machine-learning workloads. One notable customer, Snapchat, already is using Google's platform to learn more about its users by studying the content of the photos they post on the social media site. And in March, Google enjoyed its own board game coup.