Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios', and is reminiscent of the fictional Skynet service from Terminator. A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'. Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios' A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'.

Microsoft introduced a chatbot yesterday called Tay. The company was running an experiment in conversational understanding, meaning that the more people interacted with the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot the smarter it would become. I don't know about smarter, but it didn't take more than 24 hours for Tay to become a full blown racist on Twitter. That's what the internet will do to you. When it first arrived on the scene, Tay was an innocent Twitter chatbot that you and I could interact with to see just how far along artificial intelligence has come. It didn't take long for things to get ugly though as people soon started tweeting racist and misogynistic things at Tay and it picked it all up.

It took only 24 hours for a Microsoft artificial intelligence project to turn from a typical tweeting teenage girl into a hate spewing, offensive public relations debacle, thanks to coordinated attacks on the learning software.

In a new paper, Kareem Ayoub and I explore how Artificial intelligence will shape strategy. Here, I focus on one important aspect of that: the ability of leaders to control the use of force. Technology is sometimes seen as a threat to the British military's philosophy of mission command….read

From Hammurabi to Mendel, from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Darwin, we are compulsively drawn to classifying, categorizing and coding the world around us. Coding of all kinds, whether it's a cryptographic language, a body of laws or a bunch of computer instructions, imposes a basic logic and order. To code is to create processes that impose a semblance of order on the frenzied, seemingly random world we live in. And those who create code wield power. Personalized medicine, genetically modified babies, self-driving cars and the Internet of Things, the seat of power belongs to those who code.

Artificial-intelligence software designed by Microsoft to tweet like a teenage girl has been suspended after it began spouting offensive remarks. Microsoft says it's making adjustments to the Twitter chatbot after users found a way to manipulate it to tweet racist and sexist remarks and make a reference to Hitler. The chatbot debuted on Wednesday and is designed to learn how to communicate through conversations with real humans. It targets young Americans, ages 18 to 24. Microsoft's statement Thursday says that within 24 hours, "we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways." Most messages have been deleted.

Microsoft's A.I. chatbot started out as an innocent, interesting experiment. Then the rest of the Internet showed up. After Twitter users were able to convince Tay, the name of Microsoft's chatbot available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, it appears Microsoft is giving it a break. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon," reads a statement on the website for Tay.

Webtrends CEO Joe Davis recently added his voice to the discussion surrounding machine learning in the article, "Four Reasons Marketers Should Be Excited About Machine Learning." Machine learning has the ability to consume virtually unlimited amounts of detailed data to constantly review and adjust your message based on very recent customer behaviors. Once a model is trained from a full set of data sources, it can identify the most relevant variables, limiting long and complicated integrations and allowing for focused data feeds. The speed at which machine learning can consume data and identify relevant data makes the ability to act in real time a reality. For example, machine learning can constantly optimize the next best offer for the customer, so what the customer might see at noon may be different than what that same customer sees at 1 PM.

This month I spent part of my free time to go through the'March Machine Learning Mania 2016' competition, by studying the subject and by attending two meetups here in London. The objective of the Kaggle competition was to predict the 2016 NCAA Basketball Tournament, called March Madness. It was a very enjoyable experience. You might think, what the heck has this to do with HR Analytics, the subject in which I am normally interested in. Predicting performance through machine learning algorithms is a crucial aspect for HR Analytics.

The tech company introduced "Tay" this week -- a bot that responds to users' queries and emulates the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. The aim was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets -- though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself.