While the technology to simulate conversation with a computer has been around for decades, bots -- or "chatbots" -- are an increasingly trendy model for software. This new obsession came on fast. Where did these bots come from? Is a fake conversation better than just clicking buttons? You'll be hearing a lot more about bots soon, so here's an overview.

We live in an age of disruption -- and that's a good thing. Old systems will collapse as entrepreneurs figure out how to optimize and reinvent inefficient businesses, products, and services to provide consumers (us) with all things better, faster and cheaper. According to the Olin School of Business, 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies will be gone in the next 10 years. This post is a quick look at three industries (healthcare, finance and insurance) that are ripe for disruption this decade due to big data and artificial intelligence. Clearly big data and AI will change almost every industry this decade...but none more than these. Healthcare is so massively broken, that its disruption will come easy and happen fast.

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.

Learn how to apply test-driven development (TDD) to machine-learning algorithms--and catch mistakes that could sink your analysis. In this practical guide, author Matthew Kirk takes you through the principles of TDD and machine learning, and shows you how to apply TDD to several machine-learning algorithms, including Naive Bayesian classifiers and Neural Networks. Machine-learning algorithms often have tests baked in, but they can't account for human errors in coding. Rather than blindly rely on machine-learning results as many researchers have, you can mitigate the risk of errors with TDD and write clean, stable machine-learning code. If you're familiar with Ruby 2.1, you're ready to start.

"To me, the human should be more important than the technology," says Steve Wozniak. "The way we think, use our brains, interact with each other, get around with our lives – these should be more important than the technology. The technology should adapt to our ways, our customs, and our concepts of what is right and wrong." So, technology needs to fit in or push off – given the speaker, it's a fascinating statement of principle. Any dinner party discussion about who has most influenced life in the modern era is bound to include Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Boosting is a machine learning meta-algorithm that aims to iteratively build an ensemble of weak learners, in an attempt to generate a strong overall model. For example, consider a problem of binary classification with approximately 50% of samples belonging to each class. Random guessing in this case would yield an accuracy of around 50%. So a weak learner would be any algorithm, however simple, that slightly improves this score – say 51-55% or more. Usually, weak learners are pretty basic in nature.

A British Airways aircraft was possibly hit by a drone Sunday near Heathrow airport as it was coming to land, which is likely to increase demands for greater checks on the flights of the devices. The Airbus A320 flight from Geneva, carrying 132 passengers and five crew members, appears to have not been significantly impacted and was cleared for its next flight, according to news reports. The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority said it was aware of "a possible incident" with a drone at Heathrow on Sunday, which is subject to investigation by the Metropolitan Police. It reminded drone users of the country's "dronecode," which prohibits drones from flying above 400 feet (about 122 meters) and requires them to stay away from aircraft, helicopters, airports and airfields. "It is totally unacceptable to fly drones close to airports and anyone flouting the rules can face severe penalties including imprisonment," the CAA said in a statement Sunday.

For the past few minutes I've been chatting with George Washington, and honestly he seems rather drunk. He also appears to have been hanging around with 20-somethings, because he keeps saying things like "cool, haha," and "u wanna join my army or wut?" This, of course, is not actually America's first president. It is automated, conversational artificial intelligence, known as a chatbot, created by Drunk History, a comedy TV show, and made available through the messaging program Kik. You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services including Kik, WeChat, Telegram, and now, Facebook Messenger. Some are simply meant to entertain, but a growing number are designed to do something useful.

Brad has worked in the network and computer security field in both the public and private sectors. He has done everything from conducting penetration tests to reverse engineering... In 2010, Steffen Rendle, currently a senior research scientist at Google, introduced a seminal paper in the world of machine learning. In this work, Rendle described a concept known as a factorization machine. Many years have passed since such an impactful algorithm has been introduced in the world of machine learning.

Big innovations come in unexpected bursts. We grow accustomed to life and work as we know it, until something apparently simple brings about bold change. For example, we used phones for 100 years, but making them mobile transformed the world.