Bots are fast becoming all the rage in tech, offering users the ability to use a messaging app to type in simple English requests to services like Uber. The user interface is just like texting a friend, and it's far simpler to enter a message than to download and use a clunky native app. As more bots and bot platforms like Slack emerge, it's interesting to note that Google has spent almost 20 years perfecting how to respond to a text query. Today's bots have a lot to learn from Google's lessons in natural language interpretation, artificial intelligence, and user interface. The quintessential example of a bot is ordering an Uber on Slack, which is relatively straightforward since Slack on mobile knows where you are.

Machine Learning algorithms powered by intelligent applications serve useful functions in our daily lives in ways we may not even be aware of. For instance, predictive analytics allow businesses to retain key customers, help assembly lines and buildings to run more efficiently, and help us find movies that we are likely to find intriguing. The ML field has gained tremendous traction and respect over the last decade, prompting Harvard Business Review to name the Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century. To encourage new ML applications and foster a vibrant online community, we are thrilled to launch Cortana Intelligence Competitions, a gamification feature of Cortana Intelligence Suite, as well as our first competition Decoding Brain Signals. This platform provides an intuitive and fun environment to hone users' data science and analytics expertise, and our first competition will allow you to have the chance to contribute to the important field of neuroscience to win prizes and recognition.

From Facebook to Amazon to Microsoft to Apple, big tech companies are racing to improve speech-synthesis systems. And the systems, which have become increasingly realistic-sounding, have a lot of potential benefits--from serving the blind, to helping people who are illiterate access information online, to assisting the elderly. TechRepublic spoke to Alan Black, a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researcher who studies speech-synthesis systems. Black explained what's new in voice-recognition, the current challenges, and what we should be concerned about. What is the current technology behind speech-recognition?

The distribution of the outcome variable quality is a bit funky – the values are mostly 5 and 6 (how would you check this?). This could get a bit irksome later on, so go ahead and recode the quality scores into something more convenient. One idea would be to label wines as being either high quality (e.g. if their score is 6 or higher) or low quality (if the score is 6 or lower).

It's by now a given that one of the best ways to eat better, whether that means consuming less calories and-or more vegetables and-or whatever, is to just actually pay attention to what we eat. This is the big secret behind dieting--any old fad diet is probably going to have a positive effect simply because the dieter is paying more attention to what they put into their face. And just by virtue of paying attention, they will probably eat healthier. The fad diet usually gets the credit, but just caring at all goes a very long way. Paying attention is hard, however.

Although machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been around for decades, most of the recent advances in these fields have been enabled by two trends: larger publicly available research data sets and the availability of more powerful computers -- specifically ones powered by GPUs. Most of the major advances in these areas move forward in lockstep with our computational ability, as faster hardware and software allow us to explore deeper and more complex systems. At Facebook, we've made great progress thus far with off-the-shelf infrastructure components and design. We've developed software that can read stories, answer questions about scenes, play games and even learn unspecified tasks through observing some examples. But we realized that truly tackling these problems at scale would require us to design our own systems.

Eyeriss' trick is to avoid swapping data when possible. Each of the cores (which effectively serves as a neuron) has its own memory, and compresses data whenever it leaves. It also keeps the amount of work to a minimum. Nearby cores can talk directly to each other, so they don't need to talk to a central source (say, main memory) if what they need is close at hand. On top of that, a special delegation circuit gives cores as much work as they can handle without going back to fetch data.

The bot, which was primarily targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds, was designed to "engage and entertain people" through "casual and playful conversation." But, after a short period of interacting with Twitter users, Tay began to spit out some of the most obscene statements known to man. Tay's bio, which coins her as "Microsoft's AI fan from the Internet that's got zero chill," is remarkably accurate. From praising Hitler and disputing the existence of the holocaust, to advocating genocide and calling Black people the'N word,' Tay was completely out of control. And, although Microsoft has deleted most of her most inappropriate statements, many of us are left to wonder how this sort of thing could happen in the first place.

Conversation fillers such as "hmm" and "uh-huh" may seem like insignificant parts of human conversation, but they're critical to improving communication between humans and artificial intelligence (A.I.). So argues Alan Black, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, who specializes in speech synthesis and ways to make artificially intelligent speech sound more real. Both Siri and Cortana incorporate aspects of Black's work, he says. But for the most part, such technologies still boil down to a pretty simple pattern: The human speaks, then the machine processes that speech and answers. "It's not really how humans interact," Black said in an interview on Friday. Key to making such conversations more natural are pauses, fillers, laughs and the ability of speakers to anticipate and complete each other's sentences -- all of which help build rapport and trust.

Recent work in the study of dreaming indicates that more than just subconscious entertainment is going on. Sleep appears to help us work through and understand events of the day. Sleep also seems to provide a mechanism for impressing important memories on the brain, to make sure we have a long-term record of an event or concern. Sleep also seems to have a role in learning a skill; people who practiced a skill and then slept on it were more skillful than those who had not yet had a chance to sleep.