Debugging web apps MIT researchers reported that they've developed a system that can quickly comb through tens of thousands of lines of application code to find security flaws by exploiting some peculiarities of the Ruby on Rails web programming framework. The team said that in tests on 50 popular web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program. Daniel Jackson, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said the system uses static analysis, which seeks to describe, in a very general way, how data flows through a program. "The classic example of this is if you wanted to do an abstract analysis of a program that manipulates integers, you might divide the integers into the positive integers, the negative integers, and zero." The static analysis would then evaluate every operation in the program according to its effect on integers' signs.

The great irony is that AI technology being honed and implemented right now could actually help increase diversity within the field itself, as tech companies leverage machine learning programs to pinpoint unconscious gender bias in the workplace. A slate of machine learning programs on the market utilize data and algorithms to spot diversity blind spots and help companies fill in the gaps. But eradicating bias isn't just politically correct; increasing gender diversity could change the face of AI research as well. There's a new theory floating around the engineering and computer science industries that women are far more likely to enroll and stay invested in the field if the work being produced is more societally meaningful. Programs that focus on humanistic applications for the greater good perform remarkably better where diversity is concerned: A new UC Berkeley Ph.D. program in development engineering boasted a 50 percent female enrollment rate in its inaugural 2014 class, and MIT's D-Lab, which aims to build technology to improve the lives of the impoverished, is 74 percent female.

I don't know if you're in the market for a new car, of course, but chances are that soon, possibly the next time you buy a vehicle, it will have so much processing power and artificial intelligence that you won't won't be able to keep up. Because the smarter cars get, the safer we become. It's estimated that we could reduce traffic fatalities by 90% -- or 30,000 lives every year -- by 2050, once cars start driving themselves. To get there, tech companies are creating hardware and software that make semi-autonomous and fully autonomous cars a reality. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google are two leaders in the car tech space -- and they're just getting started.

We can predict the future, to an extent. Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, often cited by futurist Ray Kurzweil as an influential thought leader in the classic debate between man and machine, theorized that human behavior can be predicted in aggregate over a long period of time. So, if we believe that past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, we can take a good guess at what the far future holds for us. If this pattern continues, then the next generation of technology will be autonomous. We're already seeing this become a reality.

Nadine, a robot receptionist at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), is staring at the visitor in front of her. "I remember you," she says. "You were here last Saturday." The long-haired, uncannily human-looking robot pauses as her software runs through past interactions to figure out the most appropriate thing to say. Finally, she settles on: "We talked about your job."

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?

Here is the link to coursera course for NLP Pick the software from the The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group and input some text to view its parse tree, named entities, part of speech tags, etc.

A recent article titled "Why is AI Female?" made the connection that gendered labor, in service professions in particular, is fueling our expectations for gendered AI assistants and service robots. Furthermore, the author argues, this "feminizing -- and sexualizing -- of machines" signals a future with a disproportionate use of feminized VR and robots for a male-dominated sex industry. "Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we've largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars." Herbert Televox and Mr. Telelux, the early 20th century robots made by Westinghouse, were both male.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday bot support for the Mac and web versions of Skype, after adding it to the Windows version weeks ago. The bot support brings the artificial intelligence technology cross-platform, available in a new preview for the communication software. Bots available include Murphy, a bot to find and create images for "when questions can't be answered by words alone," and Summarize, a bot designed to give an overview of a web page if "you don't have time to read the whole thing". To get started with bots on the Mac version of Skype, tap on the "Contacts" from the menu and select "Add Bot" to search for or view a list of available bots. The bots are also available on Windows, Android, iPhone, and iPad, and Skype has created a developer program for third-party developers to create bots for the platform.

At last week's F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg showed off the company's ten-year roadmap. Zuckerberg's intention here was to show Facebook's three-stage gameplan in action: First, you take a neat cutting-edge technology. Then, you build a product based on it. Then, you turn it into an ecosystem where developers and outside companies can use that technology to build their own businesses. Maybe I'm weird, though, because I looked at this slide and said "okay...then what happens?" Facebook is too busy with the short term to provide handy answers.