As part of Interaction16, in a packed room at Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, Chris Noessel gave a fascinating and compelling talk on the dawn of agentive technology, and the implications for UX designers. The audience provided a mixed response to the opening question, "Who is afraid of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?" Chris elaborated from his experience with students that perhaps the question might be, "Who is afraid of what humans will do with AI?" Chris talked about the emergence of a new category of technology that works on behalf of users to complete tasks. This category, which he is calling agentive technology, can be seen as a particular form of Artificial Intelligence. The Roomba vacuuming robot automatically vacuums your floors, navigating the space, returns to its charging dock when needed and cleans according to a schedule you set. Get Narrative is a wearable camera that automatically captures images by default every 30 seconds.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

Our recent research article which was accepted for publication in the proceedings of World Congress of Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2016) presents our experiments with Neural Turing Machine (NTM), recently proposed by Google researchers. We published one of the first NTM open source implementation which was able to repeat experiments in the paper. Recently, we work on improvements that enable faster and more stable NTM learning. NTM proved that it is very powerful in learning and generalizing long sequences. It can outperform standard recurrent neural networks as well as popular gating recurrent nets (LSTM). We extended NTM to be able to efficiently predict sequential patterns.

Microsoft today accidentally re-activated "Tay," its Hitler-loving Twitter chatbot, only to be forced to kill her off for the second time in a week. Tay "went on a spam tirade and then quickly fell silent again," TechCrunch reported this morning. "Most of the new messages from the millennial-mimicking character simply read'you are too fast, please take a rest,'" according to the The Financial Times. "But other tweets included swear words and apparently apologetic phrases such as'I blame it on the alcohol.'" Tay's account, with 95,100 tweets and 213,000 followers, is now marked private.

In the early 1900s, Wilhelm von Osten, a German horse trainer and mathematician, told the world that his horse could do math. For years, Von Osten traveled Germany giving demonstrations of this phenomenon. He would ask his horse, Clever Hans, to compute simple equations. In response, Hans would tap his hoof for the correct answer. But scientists did not believe Hans was as clever as Von Osten claimed.

Microsoft's AI chat bot, Tay, in action (before it got racist and rowdy). Apparently, waking up grumpy is a universal trait for teens. Microsoft's Tay, the artificial-intelligence teenage chatbot, was put to bed last week after its exposure to Twitter left it a horny racist. But after a short nap, it awoke on Wednesday to spew nonsensical rubbish for a couple of hours before dozing off again. The AI Twitter bot started life as a Microsoft research project, designed to learn the art of millennial conversation through interactions with real people.

Microsoft's AI experiment, the Twitter chatbot TayandYou, went off the rails after being exposed to the internet for a day, but the U.S. tech giant has not given up its artificial intelligence plans. CEO Satya Nadella is expected to reveal a future surrounded by chatbots during Wednesday's Build 2016 keynote. While Tay may appeal to millennials, Microsoft AI will cater to different audiences with personalities to match. The Microsoft Build 2016 keynote speech Wednesday will emphasize a future with chatbot assistants helping people live their digital lives, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. At Microsoft Build 2016, Nadella will unveil several chatbots that users can interact with via text, can appear in Skype or can serve a valuable service for the visually impaired.

Microsoft is hoping to replicate the success of WeChat in China, a messaging app that lets you do things like shop, buy movie tickets and order taxis. Plenty of other companies are also looking closely at bots: Facebook has its M virtual assistant, and Amazon has Alexa, which works like a chatbot even though you actually have to talk to it. The main idea with all of these products is to deliver information, or accomplish simple tasks, without having to deal with an app or website. This new initiative is an important one for Nadella, as it's the first new Microsoft project that he's entirely responsible for. Microsoft will try to prove to developers at Build that it's simple to build bots, and it'll show off demos to prove that they can be useful, like ordering a Domino's pizza.

Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy. Fortunately, a number of Quora Q&As offer an insight into "What does it take to work at Google DeepMind?" and "What is it like to work at Google DeepMind?"

Graph database experts set to discuss GPU accelerated graph query, data analytics and machine learning, and graph database and analytics during April conference. Blazegraph, creator of the industry's first GPU-accelerated high-performance database for large graphs, announced today that company graph database experts will deliver three presentations on using GPUs for graph applications at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) being held April 4 through April 7, 2016, at the San Jose Marriott and Convention Center in Silicon Valley. GTC is the largest and most important event of the year for GPU developers. This year's event will showcase some of the most vital work being done in the computing industry today, including on artificial intelligence and deep learning, virtual reality and self-driving cars. "GPU-Accelerated Graph Query for Cyber Applications," Jim Carbonaro, Senior Software Engineer at Blazegraph (S6337),Tuesday, April 5, 2016 at 2 p.m. PDT in Marriott Salon 2. Carbonaro will discuss how Blazegraph GPU meets the unique challenges of defending networks in cyberspace by delivering near-real-time performance at very large data scales, using a flexible and updated graph representation to support complex analytics, and supporting existing graph frameworks (RDF, Apache Tinkerpop) and query languages (SPARQL).