Facebook may be busy with virtual reality, chatbots, and 360-degree cameras, but the company hasn't forgotten about your News Feed. In fact, its latest work with artificial intelligence may make change the ever-scrolling landscape of our status updates and posts. The tech company revealed concepts for how AI can augment its social media platform. Facebook's Applied Machine Learning team has been working on overdrive - conducting nearly 50 times as many experiments on the site's AI algorithm a day than compared to last year, producing some intriguing uses along the way. What can all that processing power and boundless parameters do for your Facebook feed?

Lessons from Kaggle competitions, including why XG Boosting is the top method for structured problems, Neural Networks and deep learning dominate unstructured problems (visuals, text, sound), and 2 types of problems for which Kaggle is suitable. Here is a summary of Anthony Goldbloom presentation at the Data Science Chicago Meetup, Nov 2 2015. Nice to see Anthony coming from financial statistics/econometrics (he mentioned his first job was with the Reserve Bank of Australia).

Facebook may be busy with virtual reality, chatbots, and 360-degree cameras, but the company hasn't forgotten about your News Feed.

A week later, she was accidentally activated during testing, and within minutes had succumbed to a "kush" induced freakout. Tay is now offline, and her account made private, much like any parent will do when their teenager gets into trouble on the internet. What went wrong with Tay? No one should find it surprising that releasing a machine learning chatbot on social media, in the guise of a teenage girl no less, would result in a wave of interactions designed to test the limits of the technology -- and anyone who has ever spoken to Siri, Cortana or any other virtual assistant knows that one of the first tests involves saying the most profane statements you can think of. Microsoft was certainly aware of this; their VA, Cortana, is often subject to sexual harassment, and so she has been designed to fight back.

For many people in Zambia with health queries, sending a text message is the best way to get it answered. U-report, a free SMS-based service set up by UNICEF and run by volunteers, receives many thousands of questions a month, many specifically about HIV and AIDS. Also popular in Uganda, U-report has seen usage triple in the last three years, and about a thousand new users register every day. The volume of messages is growing so fast that the volunteers can't keep up, so UNICEF is testing software that reads and responds to many of the messages automatically. In Zambia, there are roughly 27,000 new HIV infections a year, according to UNICEF, and 40 per cent of these are in those aged 15 to 24.

Facebook's big announcement at its annual F8 Developer conference, was to make Messenger, its 900-million-user messaging app into a full-fledged platform that allows businesses to communicate with users via chatbots. On the surface, that sounds like a standard, if very ambitious, product announcement, taking an already successful product to the next level. But it's a lot more than that, and it's worth looking into the three intersecting trends rolled into this one announcement to understand why it's a big deal, and why the the chatter around chatbots is everywhere. What we quaintly call "phones" aren't used much for phone calls these days. In fact, measured by actual usage, they're messaging devices; for most users, messaging (texting and all of its more advanced variants) is the core function of the phone, the place they're focused on most of the time.

Called "Deep learning" in the industry, artificial intelligence can be used to create profiles of its users and signal alerts when deviations occur. Security professionals are not saying that human intervention is no longer necessary. While machines can read and analyze data, humans should still intervene to interpret the data to determine if there is indeed an existential threat to the network. In the case of a potential breach, AI can shut systems down preventing malware from getting deep into the network and raise security alerts to the professionals for further investigation. It creates the opportunity for organizations to fix problems before they become too expensive or widespread. Global Data Sentinel uses AI to detect suspicious behavior automatically, based on its ability to learn from previous user behavior.

Facebook is envisioning a day when you won't need to leave their main and Messenger apps the whole day, just to do other things. Mark Zuckerberg himself announced during the F8 developers' conference that they are opening up the Messenger Platform so businesses and developers will be able to create chatbots and bring customer service, e-commerce interactions, and other interactive experiences to the Messenger app. The possibilities are endless as to how brands can now interact with their customers and loyal users through Messenger. It's not just about them letting people know about their latest news or product offers or freebies. You can order flowers' publishers can send a daily digest of important news items; you can reserve a room at a hotel, the possibilities are endless.

The rise of neural networks and generative design have created new opportunities for designers. But what if it went the other way, and robots created a Skynet that kills off human designers (or at least their careers) once and for all? Depending on whether you embrace or fear the robo-future of design, Mark Maker (via Sidebar) could be considered either the beginning of the end, or proof that such fears are overstated, because bots are still pretty crap at design. The system then uses a genetic algorithm--a kind of program that mimics natural selection--to generate an endless succession of logos. When you like a logo, you click a heart, which tells the system to generate more logos like it.

In addition to accessing cutting edge data analytics tools, and allowing them to scale at speed, companies are looking to platform-as-a-service providers Google, Microsoft and Amazon to remove trade barriers in complex markets like China. Last week, Xero announced a strategic push into Asia with the opening of its new regional headquarters in Singapore. But it will bide its time on China until big platform-as-a-service providers pave the way. "As it works at the moment, we would have to give Chinese authorities access to our source code and host our data in China. I don't know that we'd feel very comfortable with that," Mr Drury told The Australian Financial Review at Xerocon last year when asked about the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal involving Australia and 11 other countries.