From a huge effort to help kids realize their potential to a celebration of our dear old planet, this week brought plenty of interesting and inspiring news around Microsoft. We've rounded up some of the highlights in this latest edition of Weekend Reading. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced grants to 100 nonprofit partners in 55 countries as part of YouthSpark, a global initiative to increase access for young people to learn computer science. In turn, these nonprofit partners -- such as Laboratoria, CoderDojo and City Year -- will use the power of local schools, businesses and community organizations to empower students to achieve more for themselves, their families and their communities. The nonprofits will build upon the work that Microsoft already has underway through programs like Hour of Code with Code.org,

Many companies are not as "leading-edge" in terms of analytics as they think. Achieving marketing excellence is based on making good marketing decisions. Making good marketing decisions involves highly skilled marketers, strong data and, above all, quality analytics. If you have good people, great data, and superior analytics, the customer will be at the center of all your strategies and operations. When you get this right, the customer experience will grow, and when that grows, so does revenue and profitability.

With all the buzz about artificial intelligence and the launch of the Facebook bot marketplace, I thought it might be helpful to look at the potential implications for marketers over the next 12 months and provide a relatively jargon-free look at some of the near-term opportunities and tips on how to start to prepare for them. At a high level, it's about using AI to power more direct interactions between brands and people, focusing on faster, smarter responses to their questions and needs. Yes, Facebook has released the bot store and messenger maps will become the primary channel for digital customer service and inquires. Facebook is not the only one -- Microsoft has a bot API in Skype and other popular messaging apps such as Kik have also released functionality. Brands like KLM have already rolled our messenger bots for accessing your flight data, and airlines are some of the biggest users of customer service via Twitter.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the convenient future. It is one of the most promising and transformative opportunities of our time. We are closer to the near future where virtual assistants, bots, and software agents will act more and more like people. Some the biggest advances in AI are being developed inside tech giants such as Google (Deep Mind) and IBM (Watson). But there are still a lot of great opportunities for young startups to explore.

Brands need to be "waking up" up to the potential of bots and be aware of sensors, the cloud and machine learning as we approach the "fourth industrial revolution", Microsoft's UK chief marketing officer told The Drum. Paul Davies, who spoke on the Advertising Week Europe panel dubbed'How smart cities will transform advertising', explained how Microsoft is already looking to an automated, connected future when designing and collaborating on innovations. "We have an app experience for people who are visually impaired, which is powered through bluetooth sensors to help them walk around all the way, through an electric car sharing company called Autolib," he said. "Their mission is to reduce the number of cars in Paris by 25,000 in the next seven years...using data and the cloud to empower that." Davies believes the world is "on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution".

Following last week's predictions by Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed that the search giant has a vision about artificial intelligence too. Quizzed on parent Alphabet's Q1 2016 investor call about areas where Google is pushing forward innovation, Pichai said search, particularly on mobile devices, has the opportunity to become closer to a personal assistant for users and, to fulfill that vision, must deploy machine learning and AI. "And overall, I do think in the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world. And I do think we are at the forefront of development," he said, polishing the search giant's credentials just a week after founder Mark Zuckerberg made a similar claim for Facebook at the F8 developer event. AI-based chatbots, for instance for Facebook Messenger, was a big theme at the social giant's event. Pichai also referenced the "great strides" made by AlphaGo, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, which shocked audiences when it beat a professional South Korean Go player in Seoul last month.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing. "BCI was a technology that was geared specifically for medical purposes, and in order to expand this to the general public, we actually have to embrace these consumer brand devices and push them to the limit."

Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Ira Cohen, co-founder and chief data scientist at Anodot (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to Anodot). Since my days in quantitative finance, I've had a longstanding interest in time-series analysis. Back then, I used statistical (and data mining) techniques on relatively small volumes of financial time series.

That's an interesting question, and I try to answer this is a very general way. The tl;dr version of this is: Deep learning is essentially a set of techniques that help we to parameterize deep neural network structures, neural networks with many, many layers and parameters. And if we are interested, a more concrete example: Let's start with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) … On a tangent: The term "perceptron" in MLPs may be a bit confusing since we don't really want only linear neurons in our network. Using MLPs, we want to learn complex functions to solve non-linear problems. Thus, our network is conventionally composed of one or multiple "hidden" layers that connect the input and output layer.

Google made headlines earlier this year when its AlphaGo AI defeated world champion Lee Se-Dol in the ancient board game Go. But a group of researchers want to push the boundaries and see how a computer might fare in a first-person shooter deathmatch. The 2016 Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference will host a competition to determine the best bot that's capable of winning a multiplayer round of Doom, while playing the way a human does. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. That means that unlike enemy AI in video games, which have a complete overview of the level's map, locations of powerups and weapons, the bots will have to rely only on raw visual input that mimics what a human gamer sees when they play a game. The Visual AI Doom Competition will pit bots against each other in two tracks: the first one will see them playing a map known to their programmers with only rocket launchers and health boosts, while the other will feature an undisclosed map with all weapons and items available.