Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Microsoft has taken its AI chatbot Tay offline after machine learning taught the software agent to parrot hate speech. Tay, introduced on Wednesday as a conversational companion for 18 to 24 year-olds with mobile devices, turned out to be a more astute student of human nature than its programmers anticipated. Less than a day after the bot's debut it endorsed Hitler, a validation of Godwin's law that ought to have been foreseen. Engineers from Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams created Tay as an experiment in conversational understanding. The bot was designed to learn from user input and user social media profiles.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automationBig Performance from Low-Power Hardware. Read more ... » moonshot like the selfWhen is CES 2016, what will be the best gadgets and how much are ticket prices?. Read more ... »-driving car challenges of the earlyHome IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applicationsNvidia Releases Machine Learning Products for Hyperscale Datacenters. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape.

Microsoft has blamed a "co-ordinated attack" by Twitter users for the racist and other offensive comments spouted by an automatedBillionaire Says Smarter Tech Will Destroy Jobs At a Record Clip. Read more ... » chatbot it released on the social networkMicrosoft's HoloLens award recipients, Instagram client pulled from iOS store,…. The claim came as the softwareMicrosoft Integrates Cortana, Power BI. Read more ... » company was forced into a strenuous apology for the tweets sent out by its artificialMicrosoft and I can see that this blog post displeases you. Read more ... » characterHow Imperson Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Bring Miss Piggy To Life. Read more ... », called Tay.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted). Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014.

In much the same way businesses have been eager to use big data analytics to improve their operations, many companies have paid a lot of interest to the growing field of machine learning. Unlike some other tech trends that have come and gone, machine learning appears to be more than just some fad. The recent rise in the number of machine learning SaaS solutions launched in 2015 shows that this development has genuine staying power. Machine learning products are on the rise as well, and as organizations become more familiar with the concept, the demand will almost certainly increase. While much has been made over what affects machine learning can have on the world and businesses in particular, it's equally important to look at the impact it may have on IT departments.

In this multi-part series, we'll look at upcoming trends in marketing in 2016 you should be prepared to address. Machine learning has been a goal of computer scientists and engineers since the 1950s, but only in the last 5 years has it become accessible to more people. Prior to the democratization of machine learning, advanced technologies were limited to the biggest computer science companies and laboratories, only for corporations with the biggest budgets. In short, it's a discipline of computer science in which machines teach themselves, learn from data, and change their programming as data changes. Machine learning means machines figure out how to recognize patterns and adapt to them.

IN 1996 IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a game of chess against one of its computers, Deep Blue. Mr Kasparov, regarded as one of the best-ever players, won--but Deep Blue won the rematch. Two decades on, computers are much better than humans at chess but remain amateurs when it comes to the much tougher, ancient game of Go. Or at least, they did. Now a computer has managed to thrash a top-drawer human player.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent (and hilarious) Robotics Challenge. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape. Seriously, check out that cool chart at the top (much bigger version at DARPA's site if you want to print out the poster – 56k warning): everything is spoken for right up to the border with microwave frequencies, and more gadgets are crowding into each one daily. "The current practice of assigning fixed frequencies for various uses irrespective of actual, moment-to-moment demand is simply too inefficient to keep up with actual demand and threatens to undermine wireless reliability," said William Chappell, director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, in a DARPA press release.

Microsoft's Tay shows that if we treat newborn AI programs as mature, they can be instantly corrupted. If we don't instill ethics or morals into newly created bots, just as we do with our children, they will digest and spit back the worst of humanity unthinkingly. And while artificially intelligent bots may not deliberately start shooting to kill, they could unintentionally precipitate human disasters, say, a genocide, because of a lack of ethical principles. The time has come to consider who will be the guardian of AI. This is not the first time the debate about ethics of AI has surfaced.