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.

When Intel announced that it would lay off 12,000 workers in an effort to restructure itself for the post-PC age, there was one notable word missing from its spin-heavy press release: mobile. The press release said that the chipmaker was cutting 11 percent of its global workforce in order to "accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices." But that doesn't mean smartphones--or, at least, it doesn't seem to. The bit about "smart, connected computing devices" is a reference to the Internet of Things. Okay, that gawd awful buzz-phrase don't really capture the full scope of what Intel is trying to do there--it's not just Internet-connected thermostats.

With the next series of Game of Thrones set to hit our screens this month anxious fans may be wondering which one of their favourite characters is next on the hit list. The first five of the series have not been an easy watch, with the writers killing off key characters just when their luck starts to change and as audiences warmed to them. But researchers have developed a computer algorithm aimed at predicting the next character to die in the hit series. Students in Germany have developed a GoT-related computer algorithm which uses available data from the internet to predict the next character to die. By trawling the internet for data and clues, a team of computer scientists have created a model which crunches the numbers to work out which characters are most likely to die in the upcoming sixth series.

Tell us more about your favorate machine learning framework in comments. Bio: Devendra Desale(@DevendraDesale) is a data science graduate student currently working on text mining and big data technologies. He is also interested in enterprise architectures and data-driven business. When away from the computer, he also enjoys attending meetups and venturing into the unknown.