It's been rumoured for months, but on Friday, Electronic Arts confirmed that the next title in its Battlefield series of military shooters will be set during the first world war. While the rival Call of Duty titles have been marching ever further into the future, Battlefield 1 is an attempt to re-engage with fans of the genre, who fell for titles like Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor and the original Call of Duty games with their depiction of historically authentic scenarios. "This was the dawn of all-out war, the switch from the old world to the new world," says creative director Lars Gustavsson. "Battlefield has always been about the land, sea and air war experience. This was something we had to do." According to Gustavsson, this project has been bubbling under for several years, though when Battlefield 4 came to a close, it gave the team the opportunity to start on something new.

Researchers often need to go beyond Google to find the kind of medical journal articles and flat data files necessary for their work. But many journal articles are locked away in databases like JSTOR or PubMed, which don't have the reliable search capabilities of an engine like Google -- so researchers have to waste time tracking them down. Enter Helix, a word processor plug-in created at this year's Disrupt NY Hackathon by Paul Burke and Neil Krishnan. Helix uses machine learning to suggest citations and relevant research as you write. Helix scans a writer's text as he or she types and automatically pulls in recommendations for relevant journal articles, news and Wikipedia pages.

"You should be able to message a business in the same way you'd message a friend," said Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 developer conference last month as he laid out his vision for the social network's future. Bots took front and centre of his 10-year road map – and we're not talking spammy Twitter accounts here. Instead, brands are increasingly experimenting with chatbots to usher in a new era of'conversational commerce', to use a term coined by Uber's Chris Messina. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Facebook's chatbots will allow customers to interact with partner brands like KLM and 1-800 Flowers inside its Messenger platform to review orders, make customer service enquiries and more. The social giant's long-anticipated foray into AI will help it gain ground on messaging rivals, such as Kik and Chinese giant WeChat, which are investing in their very own branded bot armies.

"Dave Palmer, Director of Technology and ex-Mi5 and GCHQ at Darktrace, would like to offer his opinion on why the machine is ready to fight back on its own," reads the invite I'm sent by Darktrace's PR team. It is pitched as a defence of machine learning from the slightly off kilter perspective of security. There has been an awful lot written about machine learning and automation recently. Much of this takes the angle that the more work machines can do the less jobs will be available for human beings. The emphasis is scare mongering, an angle which often flies in the face of all the big possibilities afforded by machine learning which still, after all, require vast swathes of human assistance.

Artificial intelligence can solve routine tasks but still struggles to be creative or collaborate with us. Imagine if machines were as creative and as collaborative as humans. By working together with a creative computer intelligence, you might produce a beautiful piece of art in only a few hours. But even though artificial intelligence keeps improving, this dream is still far away. It turns out that teaching computer programs to play chess is much easier than teaching them to help us write symphonies.

A day spent at the inaugural AI Summit in London last week highlighted the inherent contradiction when it comes to artificial intelligence and the enterprise: AI has been on the industry's radar for decades, yet businesses aren't ready to deploy the technology just yet. Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London said that artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest fashion in an industry that is known for them: "Larry Ellison famously said that there is nothing more fashion led than the IT industry. We can see AI as a new fashion, rebadging a load of old ideas, but essentially technology has always been about adding value to an organisation." David Schatsky, head of the trend-sensing program for the US innovation team at Deloitte is a little more positive, saying: "I have looked at literally hundreds of examples of organisations in every industry that have applied or are piloting cognitive technologies in some way. We've found that you can classify everything into one of these three buckets of applications: product, process and insight."

According to researchers, 2016 will be the year of AI. Believed to be replacing the screen age as one of the "hot consumer trends," the latest in AI allows for much more than robots, personal assistants, and self-driving cars. Facebook recently announced that the company is open-sourcing its Big Sur servers designed for deep learning (i.e. The move comes as no surprise. Google, IBM, and Microsoft already took decisive steps towards opening their AI technologies earlier this year.

'Colonel Sanders is raising a robot army to serve fried chicken at a restaurant near you. KFC's first automated restaurant, called Original, went live in Shanghai on April 25th, complete with an artificially intelligent robot manager named "Du Mi" who works at the front counter. According to Chinese news outlet Sohu, "'Du Mi' marks the first commercial use of artificial intelligence in the fast food industry. The artificial intelligence robot was launched by China's leading web services company Baidu during its World Conference in 2015."'

Companies or enterprises are half as likely to encounter malware as consumers and other users without professional IT management, according to the newest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report released Friday. The analysis, based on tens of billions of reports from computers using Microsoft security software between July and December 2015, found about 11 percent of domain-joined PCs encountered malware during the fourth quarter. In comparison, about 22 percent of non-domain-joined systems did so during that quarter. Domain-joined computers belong to an Active Directory Domain Services domain -- used almost exclusively in enterprise environments. Non-domain computers also encountered more software-based malware, such as Adware and browser modifiers or software bundlers, but domain-joined ones encountered slightly more ransomware.

There are a lot of machine learning algorithms and each algorithm is an island of research. You have to choose the level of detail that you study machine learning algorithms. There is a sweet spot if you are a developer interested in applied predictive modeling. This post describes that sweet spot and gives you a template that you can use to quickly understand any machine learning algorithm. Sweet Spot For Understanding Machine Learning Algorithms Photo by dmums, some rights reserved.