The assumption that a college education should take four years is baked into American culture. Colleges in the colonial days were founded on the premise of a four-year degree, a concept imported from Europe. Harvard University experimented with a three-year degree when it was founded in 1636, but the test was short-lived, and the four-year degree has been the standard ever since. We expect students to enter college at 18 and leave when they turn 22, and we worry about those who take a more circuitous route to graduation. But we need to reconsider that long-established, one-size-fits all model.

Facebook has begun rolling out its new chatbot platform on Messenger, and it's available to try out right now. The long-awaited'Bot Platform' was unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the first day of the F8 developer conference, and the company hopes it's going to change the way we all use the web. Rather than browsing the latest news, communicating with businesses and buying goods through standard sites and apps, Facebook's bots make it possible to do it all through Messenger - theoretically, you should be able to get what you're looking for by speaking to the bots in natural language. The platform is currently the beta stage and it's only working with a few US-based companies. But it's already possible to get a little taste of what this technology can do.

As we put the finishing touches on what promises to be another outstanding Hardcore Data Science Day at Strata Hadoop World in New York, I sat down with my co-organizer Ben Recht for the the latest episode of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast. Recht is a UC Berkeley faculty member and member of AMPLab, and his research spans many areas of interest to data scientists including optimization, compressed sensing, statistics, and machine learning. At the 2014 Strata Hadoop World in NYC, Recht gave an overview of a nascent AMPLab research initiative into machine learning pipelines. The research team behind the project recently released an alpha version of a new software framework called KeystoneML, which gives developers a chance to test out some of the ideas that Recht outlined in his talk last year. We devoted a portion of this Data Show episode to machine learning pipelines in general, and a discussion of KeystoneML in particular.

If you don't know, docker has been around for a few years now to help with the deployment of applications using operating system level virtualization on Linux. It has a bunch of great features to help with this, but I would say the main use case for docker is that you can run any docker container on any docker host and it will run. "Docker containers run on any computer, on any infrastructure and in any cloud." Unfortunately that is wrong for deep learning applications. For any serious deep learning application, you need NVIDIA graphics cards, otherwise it could take months to train your models.

Robots are taking all the jobs. But are we, the average, moderately skilled humans, screwed, or aren't we? Let me just get it out of the way now: We are, unless there are drastic, immediate changes to education and economic systems around the world. The dominant narrative going around today about Pew Research's new report on artificial intelligence and the future of jobs is that experts can't really decide whether automation is going to make working obsolete, that it's really a toss up whether robots will simply create new jobs in other sectors as they destroy ones in other. That's true, in one sense: The 1,896 futurists, CEOs, journalists, and university professors questioned for the report were split in half over robots will "displace significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers," with 52 percent of respondents agreeing that "human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."

Neural networks are a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence: Software systems that train themselves to make sense of the human world. But if you want to understand how they work at a basic level, a cool new website allows you to get under the hood. The site is based on Google's new TensorFlow software library, which is an open source resource for people working with machine learning systems. Daniel Smilkov and Shan Carter, however, have used it to make a simple demonstration of how neural networks work. It may still look a little daunting, with all its options and inputs and layers, but it's the most straightforward tool I've seen for learning about how neural nets work. And, as the pair explain, "don't worry, you can't break it."

While most of us are aware of Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana, her more unknown little sister Xiaoice, is taking China's social network by storm. Xiaoice, a chatbot, exists on WeChat and Weibo in the form of a chatty teenager. Capable of recognizing emotional the states of the user during the conversation, it is able to offer encouragement and listen well to your troubles. More interestingly, like any other 17-year-old teenager, it can be smart-alecky at times. It's this latter attribute of Xiaoice that allows it to simulate for more natural conversations and to pass off as being human-like.

In most ancient cultures, literacy was rare, reserved for specialized scribes or religious officials. But new research shows that in the ancient kingdom of Judah, literacy may have been widespread, a fact that may reshape the timeline of when and where the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament was written. In a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers looked at 16 ink inscriptions from a Judean fort in Arad--a remote border post in ancient times--written around 600 BCE. Using computerized imaging and machine learning tools, Tel Aviv University researchers were able to determine that the messages were written by at least six different individuals. According to a press release, the incriptions were primarily about mundane topics, like troop movements and food expenses. The nature and tone of the inscriptions, the researchers say, indicates the ability to read and write all through the chain of command, from the commander of the small garrison to the deputy quartermaster of the fort.

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The battle for your online shopping dollars has largely been waged on websites and, more recently, smartphone apps. Now, retailers are looking to another digital tool to win your money and your loyalty: An army of chatbots. Chatbots -- the name for robots that simulate human conversation -- have been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks amid a flurry of new experiments in how they might be used to shape the future of shopping. Retail heavyweights Sephora and H&M recently launched bots on messaging app Kik that help shoppers browse and buy their products. Taco Bell showed off its TacoBot, a way to use the messaging app Slack to place a meal order. And on Tuesday, Facebook announced it has created a platform that allows companies to develop bots that run within its Messenger app, which has some 900 million users worldwide.