Artificial intelligence can control self-driving cars, beat the best humans at incredibly complex board games, and fight cancer; but one thing it can't do perfectly is communicate. To help solve the problem, Google has been feeding it's AI with more than 11,000 unpublished books, including 3,000 steamy romance titles. "come with me," she said. "talk to me," she said. "don't worry about it," she said.

Didi currently processes over 11 million trips, plans over 9 billion routes, and collects over 50TB of data per day. Machine learning strategies are vital to the company's success, and with growth comes the need to constantly improve on core algorithms, especially those that impact supply-demand forecasting. The competition is a challenge to machine learning and big data students around the world to improve how the company ensures riders always get a car when and where they need it, and drivers know where to be even before a ride is hailed. Didi has just published the competition data set, and registration closes on June 17 when the first round submission is due. The Top 10 teams will be invited to Didi in July to compete for the top prize.

Today at I/O, Google took the wraps off its latest foray into the world of communications: the company announced Allo, a smart messaging app supercharged with machine learning and Google's new Google Assistant service (its answer to Amazon's Alexa), giving users the ability not just to chat to each other with animated graphics and enlarging/shrinking text, but to call in Google (and later other third-party apps) to share media, plan events, buy things, and even think of what to say to each other. The iOS and Android app is being unveiled today, but it will only be live this summer, Google says. If you are a Google news watcher, Allo may not come as a complete surprise: back in December the WSJ reported that the company was working on an AI-based messaging app: this appears to be that very product. The app comes at an interesting time for Google. The company has made a number of attempts at building social products over the years, but products like Google, Wave and Buzz never really caught on at a time when other products like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have taken off.

Computers are pretty good at stocking shelves and operating cars, but are not so good at writing poetry. Scientists in a Dartmouth College competition reached that conclusion after designing artificial intelligence algorithms that could produce sonnets. Judges compared the results with poems written by humans to see if they could tell the difference. In every instance, the judges were able to find the sonnet produced by a computer program. The competition was a variation of the "Turing Test," named for British computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed an experiment to determine if a computer could have humanlike intelligence.

Ashok Goel had run into a problem. As a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, he taught an online course on artificial intelligence, and its 300 students sent in thousands of questions via an online forum each semester. The sheer volume of messages overwhelmed Goel and his eight teaching assistants. So he tried an experiment--quietly inserting some AI into the class itself. This January, with the help of several graduate students and support from IBM's breakthrough Watson technology, Goel built an AI chatbot that could field basic questions and relieve some of the burden on the class's human instructors.

Computers are pretty good at stocking shelves and operating cars, but are not so good at writing poetry. Scientists in a Dartmouth College competition reached that conclusion after designing artificial intelligence algorithms that could produce sonnets. Judges compared the results with poems written by humans to see if they could tell the difference. In every instance, the judges were able to find the sonnet produced by a computer program. The competition was a variation of the "Turing Test," named for British computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed an experiment to determine if a computer could have humanlike intelligence.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

The possibility that a malevolent artificial intelligence might pose a serious threat to humankind has become a hotly debated issue. Various high profile individuals from the physicist Stephen Hawking to the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the danger. Which is why the field of artificial intelligence safety is emerging as an important discipline. Computer scientists have begun to analyze the unintended consequences of poorly designed AI systems, of AI systems created with faulty ethical frameworks or ones that do not share human values. But there's an important omission in this field, say independent researchers Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "Nothing, to our knowledge, has been published on how to design a malevolent machine," they say.

There is a major power shift in and around corporations that potentially gives consumers and shareholders more control over organizations than they had in the past, according to Jose Luis Prado, president, Prado Strategic Consulting LLC, who also serves on several corporate boards. Mr. Prado discusses how "shared control" of organizations can create challenges related to communications, reputation and risk-taking, as well as how corporate directors can effectively respond to these challenges.

Jefferson Graham visits the Google "Sandbox" at the I/O developer's conference, where futuristic, new technologies are on display. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - The Google I/O conference brings developers--the folks who make apps for phones, computers, TVs and the like--together for a status update on all that Google is up to. The hope is that they'll start creating apps for new technologies being touted. So we spent time at the I/O conference talking to developers about what excites them about Google's future. Google demonstrated a new way of mapping, using a tablet to monitor the insides of buildings, at its Sandbox area of I/O, devoted to the newest technologies being introduced, and the exhibit easily drew the longest lines and biggest crowds.