It's easy to make too much or too little of an event that took place earlier this month. A computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match of the Japanese board game of go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol. AlphaGo won easily, 4 games to 1. It's been nearly two decades since the Deep Blue computer program beat Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 to claim superiority in that game. Go had been considered much more difficult for artificial intelligence (AI) to master (for one thing, chess is played on a board with an 8-by-8 grid producing 64 squares; the go grid is 19-by-19). AlphaGo succeeded by combining two powerful computational approaches.

Everyday virtual assistants – like Siri, or Google Now's voice feature – are well-trained to respond to your queries about weather, directions and other basic information. Now a new crop of artificial intelligence assistants with names like Tara and Amy are jockeying for a job at your company. San Francisco-based TARA, created by Iba Masood and Syed Ahmad as part of Y Combinator, is a chatbot designed to help startups and small businesses offload the work of sourcing, contacting and hiring freelancers to build and redesign websites and applications. "Our customers do not have to be technical," adds Masood, noting that the assistant has helped non-technical business owners to add functionality like apps of payments to their existing products. "Through simple commands such as'build me a VR app for Android,' TARA assigns the contractor and helps build the entire platform."

A few months ago, Microsoft released a feature for PowerPoint 2016 that can help users make better-looking slides even if they aren't presentation experts. On Thursday, it got even better with a few upgrades. PowerPoint Designer kicks in when users add images to a slide, and it provides people with a bunch of options for how they can lay those images out alongside text. Previously, the feature was only capable of handling a single image, but it now allows users to add at least two images at once to a slide, with some themes capable of handling up to four pictures in a single slide. In a blog post published Thursday, Microsoft promised users will be able to insert more images across all themes inside PowerPoint, but it didn't give a specific date for users to expect that. In addition to the multiple image support, users who add images with people in them will now get the benefit of a new facial recognition capability in Designer.

It sounds like Microsoft's Tay chatbot is getting a time-out, as Microsoft instructs her on how to talk with strangers on the Internet. Because, as the company quickly learned, the citizens of the Internet can't be trusted with that task. In a statement released Thursday, Microsoft said that a "coordinated effort" by Internet users had turned the Tay chatbot into a tool of "abuse." It was a clear reference to a series of racist and otherwise abusive tweets that the Tay chatbot issued within a day of debuting on Twitter. Wednesday morning, Tay was a novel experiment in AI that would learn natural language through social engagement.

The Twitter profile for Tay.ai, Microsoft's short-lived chatbot. The Twitter profile for Tay.ai, Microsoft's short-lived chatbot. Editor's Note: This post contains language that some readers might find offensive. Her emoji usage is on point. She says "bae," "chill" and "perf."

The key points for RAKE is the parameters setting, and RAKE provides a method to select a proper parameters based on the train data.

We list out the top 20 popular Machine Learning R packages by analysing the most downloaded R packages from Jan-May 2015. Bio: Bhavya Geethika is pursuing a masters in Management Information Systems at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her areas of interests include Statistics & Data Mining for Business, Machine learning and Data-Driven Marketing.

In an announcement made on Wednesday at its GCP Next conference in San Francisco, tech giant Google said that it is rolling out the private beta of a new Cloud Machine Learning service which will enable businesses to create a custom machine learning model for predicting the future of their ventures. According to the details shared by Google, the Cloud Machine Learning service has the capability to handle data ingestion and training, and subsequently make use of the resultant machine-learning model to make predictions for a business' future. Google said that for building a custom machine learning model that can make future predictions for the future of a business, users of the Cloud Machine Learning service need to work with data which they have stored in Google's other cloud services. In a demonstration of the creation of a custom machine learning model for predicting the future of a business, Jeff Dean -- the chief of Google's Brain deep-learning research project -- showed how the Cloud Machine Learning service could build a model which predicts a click by a consumer on an advertisement. The model demonstrated by Dean, to show how the Cloud Machine Learning service works, was based on marketing software firm Criteo's anonymized data pertaining to consumers' chances of clicking on an advertisement.

The Defense Department has decided to make a game out of the problem of spectrum crowding. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's newest Grand Challenge, will reward teams that develop systems that collaboratively (as opposed to competitively) adapt in real time to changes in congested electromagnetic spectrum, DARPA said in a release. SC2's primary goal is to imbue radios with advanced machine-learning capabilities to collectively develop strategies for optimizing use of the wireless spectrum that aren't possible today due to the intrinsically inefficient approach of pre-allocating exclusive access to designated frequencies. Making more efficient use of the finite spectrum environment has become a DOD priority as the spectrum becomes ever more crowded, and DOD has to comply with a presidential order to free up 500 MHz of its spectrum for commercial use by 2020. "I think today we're in a good spot…We did well with the last auction and the money is there to change where DOD can move and share spectrum," DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen said on March 22.

Microsoft put the brakes on its artificial intelligence tweeting robot after it posted several offensive comments, including "Hitler was right I hate the jews." The so-called chatbot TayTweets was launched by the Seattle-based software company on Wednesday as an experiment in artificial intelligence, or AI, and conversational understanding. But the company was forced to quickly pause the account and delete the vast majority of its tweets after the chatbot posted a number of offensive comments, including several that were admiring of Adolf Hitler. Along with "Hitler was right I hate the jews," among other offending tweets, according to the International Business Times, were "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. Donald Trump is the only hope we've got."