On Wednesday, when Microsoft had a much rosier view of humanity than it does now, the software giant released a "Millennial chatbot" to Twitter named Tay. She was supposed to mimic 18-to-24-year-olds, learn from her interactions, and develop a personality like her peers over time. This went exactly how you would've expected it to. Like most 19-year-olds on Twitter for 24 hours with no supervision, Tay had become a white supremacist Holocaust denier who believes that "Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler." Microsoft had to take the thing behind the server racks and shoot it Thursday morning.

In terms of robot karma, Boston Dynamics is really asking for it. The Massachusetts company posted a new video this week in which engineers trip, shove, tease and otherwise bully the latest iteration of their decidedly creepy humanoid robot named Atlas. The new video follows an earlier clip in which Boston Dynamics staffers kick around around a robotic canine named Spot. I don't know if it's some kind of r what, but the robot abuse is oddly disturbing to watch. Of course, all the shoving and poking has a purpose -- the interactions are intended to demonstrate the system's ability to react to unanticipated events.

Summary: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the long sought after'brain' that brings together all the branches of AI into a general purpose platform that can perform with human level intelligence in a broad variety of tasks. Will it free us or replace us? It's closer than you think. Can you see the forest for the trees? That's one of the questions an AI system might be asked to answer and probably not succeed.

Microsoft has apologised after a robot it made "tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images" that included support for Hitler and genocide. The company launched Tay, an artificially intelligent robot, on Twitter last week. It was intended to be a fun way of engaging people with AI – but instead was tricked by people into tweeting out support of Hitler and genocide, and repeated white power messages. Microsoft said that it had no way of knowing that people would attempt to trick the robot into tweeting the offensive words, but apologised for letting it do so. Microsoft said that it had launched Tay after success with a similar robot, XiaoIce, in China.

If venture capital and research funding are any indication, artificial intelligence will play a leading role in shaping our future. And few tech innovators in the private or public sector have been as prominent in defining that role as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at China's search giant Baidu. Ng has taught AI at Stanford, led the Google Brain project, founded online education pioneer Coursera, and just last year took his post at "China's Google" in hopes of figuring out how to teach computers to see and hear, and to do that for the world's most populous country. Small wonder why China represents such a huge opportunity for machine intelligence applications. Baidu is the world's fifth most trafficked website.

Machine learning is the automation of discovery, and it is responsible for making our smartphones work, helping Netflix suggest movies for us to watch, and getting presidents elected. But there is a push to use machine learning to do even more--to cure cancer and AIDS and possibly solve every problem humanity has. Domingos is at the very forefront of the search for the Master Algorithm, a universal learner capable of deriving all knowledge--past, present and future--from data. In this book, he lifts the veil on the usually secretive machine learning industry and details the quest for the Master Algorithm, along with the revolutionary implications such a discovery will have on our society. Pedro Domingos is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and he is the cofounder of the International Machine Learning Society. This Authors at Google talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

Summary: In just the six or seven short years since the first commercial implementation of a Hadoop NoSQL database Machine Learning has come to mean so much more than it did before. The question often comes up from folks starting to explore data science, just what is Machine Learning? When I started out it was easy to explain. Machine Learning (ML) was the category of mathematical algorithms like regression, clustering, decision trees, and neural nets used to extract signals from data, aka predictive models. Then came NoSQL and all that changed.

This is the fourth in our AI in Fintech Week series. You can see the intro post describing the current state of the art in AI here. Today we look at a job that very few people understand. It is a job that requires an aptitude for math and statistics plus knowledge of complex domains such as life expectancy, healthcare, accidents, weather, wars & terrorism. Fundamentally it is a job that requires math and statistics; our AI friend Hal is heard to say, "I am good at math and statistics, give us a job".

Anyone who's ever shaken their head over the utterances coming out of Donald Trump's mouth will surely be glad to know that they're now being improved with deep learning. DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot created by a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab that uses a deep-learning algorithm to make even Trumpier statements than Trump himself. Based on an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on transcripts of Trump's victory speeches and debate performances, the bot shows a remarkable proficiency for taking the hyperbole even further. "I'm what ISIS doesn't need" is one creation of the bot, for example. "Great manufacturing, bring back our jobs, bring back our manufacturing, because my file, you know, I don't need anybody's money. The bot creates its tweets one letter at a time, apparently following Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again."

KOCHI: Saarang Sumesh made robots on his own long before he started going to school. The seven-year-old Class II student of Choice School, Tripunithura, is the youngest maker of robots in the state and, probably, the youngest in the country as well. The Palluruthy native, son of Sumesh V S and Srijaya, started building complex machines like internal combustion engine models from the age of three. By four, he began building the LEGO NxT robot models and started making his own robot models - walking stick for the visually challenged, house-cleaning robot, robotic hand, tricycle, humanoid robot - by the time he turned five. Now, he learns and makes new Arduino projects using micro-control kit (electronic kit) and Raspberry Pi. ''When I got the Lego robotic kit I was thrilled to make robots out of it.