Today, I'm thrilled to share the news that Salesforce has acquired MetaMind. We couldn't be more excited to join Salesforce. Over the past year and a half, we've been on a mission to empower business users with state of the art deep learning technology to simplify, improve and automate decision making. And now, we'll be able to continue our journey at Salesforce on a much larger scale, with the resources and ecosystem of one of the world's most innovative and influential enterprise software companies. With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes.

Perhaps you heard recently about a new algorithm that can drive a car? Or scan a picture and find your face in a crowd? It seems as though every week companies are finding new uses for algorithms that adapt as they encounter new data. Last year Wired quoted an ex-Google employee as saying that "Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning." Machine learning has tremendous potential to transform companies, but in practice it's mostly far more mundane than robot drivers and chefs.

Our client, a known entity in the eCommerce space is looking for a Research Scientist to join their innovative team. They use machine learning and statistical techniques. They build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage the trust and safety of loads of transactions every day. Please be excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and create state-of-art algorithms to solve real world problems. They are looking for candidates who want to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company.

In this challenge we want you to take data from the world around you and turn it into shared learnings. For example, you might take College Scorecard Data and help high school students mathematically determine where they should go to college. Additionally, robots are data generating machines (literally). You might use this challenge to collect data from your wheels and drive train, and then use it to automatically switch gears based on different surfaces. You might use it for predictive maintenance.

The face of SEO is changing, and it's mainly due to incredible research and development into artificial intelligence (AI) baked into search algorithms. A decade ago, search engine marketers could create a site with some keywords in specific places, drop some links around the web, and start ranking within a short amount of time. The web has grown tremendously since that time, and now these methods are no longer viable. Instead of focusing on keywords, search engine algorithms attempt to "understand" your content. The latest news of Google's new RankBrain algorithm is just one example of why the future of SEO will change Internet marketing. Before getting into the details of 2016 SEO, it helps to understand Google's market.

Previously, I experimented with text generation using context-free grammars, one of the oldest techniques in natural language processing. I'll come back to CFGs in a future post. In this one I'm going to try my hand at classifiers. Automatic classification is the process by which a computer is trained to categorize an item into one or more defined buckets. A common type of classification is no doubt working on your behalf right this moment: spam filtering.

Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women. This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like "Her" and "Ex Machina" reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity.

Salesforce has acquired MetaMind, a deep learning startup backed by Salesforce cofounder and chief executive Marc Benioff. The startup's services will stop working on May 4. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. "Salesforce plans to integrate MetaMind's technology into Salesforce services," MetaMind cofounder and chief executive Richard Socher wrote in a blog post. "For unpaid web users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4. For our monthly recurring users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on June 4. We'll delete any data we have stored for unpaid web users and monthly recurring users after April 11." Deep learning is a type of artificial intelligence that many large technology companies -- like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter -- have invested in by way of acquisitions or in-house research.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), or the development of smart machines, has been likened to "building the Internet itself – something that can only be done over time, and with a huge number of incremental advances." The development of a wide array of intelligent machine innovations are underway in labs across the nation, and have breathtaking potential for education, healthcare, business, finance and more. MIT's Media Lab is undertaking robotic projects targeting a wide range of focus areas. For education, a team is developing language-learning companions for children, which incorporate gaming and conversation to create an immersive experience. For healthcare, the robot, Huggable, is designed to be a companion to pediatric patients in hospitals to help alleviate stress and support children as they face physical and emotional challenges.

Salesforce just bought another startup in the machine learning space, an area the cloud software maker has been doubling down on recently. The startup is called MetaMind, a startup that specializes in artificial intelligence using natural language and image recognition technology. It's raised 8 million so far from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The announcement was made through a blog post on MetaMind's website. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.