When Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Messenger would open up to branded chatbots at the F8 conference in April, 1-800 Flowers' was the example he used in his demo. "I love this one," he said. "It's pretty ironic: To order from 1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again." With the "chatbot gold rush" now in full swing, Facebook's launch partner should be a good barometer for the success of Messenger bots so far. Two months in, is anyone getting roses besides the recipient of Zuck's announcement flowers, head Messenger honcho David Marcus?

Emerging Seattle-based fintech startup Kavout has just launched its new investment platform, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), for clients to find trading opportunities using tools powered by machine learning and big data, and with a beta-version of the platform made available to investors. As robo-advisors and automated trading products continue to emerge on the retail side, following the use of algorithmic trading and A.I.-driven technology by institutional firms, Kavout's announcement today appears to reflect the growing related interest from the market for such products. Kavout uses what it calls Kai, the core AI and machine learning process that fuels Kavout's main attributes and functions, including scanning historical SEC filings and stock quotes and examining millions of points of data ever second while analyzing stocks using an objective approach. There is also a Kai Score feature within the platform that provides a predictive analysis ranking reflecting data analytics processed for each security, and based on a stock's future performance related to its valuation, growth, momentum and other qualities. An excerpt of the platform as seen below, upon logging into the beta-version of Kavout, shows one of the Kai Score features. Commenting in an official corporate announcement, Kavout's CEO and co-founder Alex Lu said: "On Wall Street, you'll see that many hedge funds and investment banks are hiring top talent in artificial intelligence and machine learning."

NEW YORK, July 6, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thanks to his business acumen, poster boy looks, and relentless activism for freedom of the internet, Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian has become one of the most high-profile residents of Brooklyn. A startup based in Armenia and San Francisco named 1AI Solutions has recently launched a working AI-based version of Alexis Ohanian named Avedis Ohanian. Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

When life calls on us to project confidence, whether you're going in for a major job interview, pitching investors or networking at a big conference, the old adage is just to fake it until you make it. But a new study from New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory released this week looks at whether the human feeling of confidence can be broken down into objective mathematical calculation. Choices that are big, such as launching a new venture, or small, such as deciding when to merge onto the highway, all require a careful weighing of the risks involved. Of course, some of these judgement calls have to occur faster than others. The study's lead author, associate professor of neuroscience Adam Kepecs, explained the driving question behind the research.

"Conversation is the new interface." The tech community's use of this expression does not mean that we are going to start talking to each other more on a human-to-human, face-to-face level. It means rather that we will be talking more to robots, specifically those artificial intelligence programs that pop up on the likes of Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack and so on, to help you with tasks from scheduling to shopping. Rather than going to a website to find information or downloading yet another app, we will summon these artificial intelligence assistants to do our bidding. Bark "find me a flight to Chicago on Saturday" into your phone and a "bot", which understands your location and the fact that you mean this Saturday, will return with some choices.

Financial services incumbents along with early-stage startups and large tech companies are all competing in fintech. CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal gave a 110-slide presentation at our fintech conference in New York. The full deck covered broad VC funding trends for fintech and the developments in large categories such as wealth management, blockchain, remittance tech, and insurance tech. On robo-advisors, Sanwal noted that market volatility has not necessarily been a boon to the category. "It's not all roses," he said. "There are headwinds … When market volatility picks up, people want to talk to an advisor." At the end Sanwal highlighted 9 trends we're watching that are generating excitement. The slides for those trends are included below. If you have questions, please use the hashtag. Use it on Twitter or on the mobile app, and I'll try to get to them. Please ask me easy questions only. If you like something about the presentation, please tweet it out. If you do not like something about the presentation, please just keep it to yourself. Let me jump in and we'll go through this pretty quickly, I think. So this is what we do, take lots of data and try to predict technology trends. You've seen this join the conversation piece. We have lots of great customers, many of whom are in the room.

Combining machine learning method -- a type of artificial intelligence -- with a special MRI technique may help physicians predict who is more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, a study says. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computer programmes to learn when exposed to new data without being programmed. "With standard diagnostic MRI, we can see advanced Alzheimer's disease, such as atrophy of the hippocampus," said principal investigator Alle Meije Wink from VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. "But at that point, the brain tissue is gone and there's no way to restore it. It would be helpful to detect and diagnose the disease before it's too late," Meije Wink explained.

We investigate an experiential learning paradigm for acquiring an internal model of intuitive physics. Our model is evaluated on a real-world robotic manipulation task that requires displacing objects to target locations by poking. The robot gathered over 400 hours of experience by executing more than 50K pokes on different objects. We propose a novel approach based on deep neural networks for modeling the dynamics of robot's interactions directly from images, by jointly estimating forward and inverse models of dynamics. The inverse model objective provides supervision to construct informative visual features, which the forward model can then predict and in turn regularize the feature space for the inverse model.

PyGame Learning Environment (PLE) is a learning environment, mimicking the Arcade Learning Environment interface, allowing a quick start to Reinforcement Learning in Python. The goal of PLE is allow practitioners to focus design of models and experiments instead of environment design. PLE hopes to eventually build an expansive library of games. Docs for the project can be found here. A PLE instance requires a game exposing a set of control methods.

Bots (and articles about bots – oops!) are popping up everywhere these days. Indeed, very few concepts have shot up the hype curve so fast, especially considering that the idea of conversational UI has been with us for a long time in various forms, and under different denominations. It looks like a jungle, but all bots are essentially doing the same thing: adding conversational capabilities to FAQ and search. You can read a good evolution and state of the art here and here. Personally, I had the pleasure of working for two companies that developed their own virtual assistant (basically a chatbot with a cute face).