During the keynote presentation at Google I/O 2016, about 7,000 developers, enthusiasts and media professionals sat in the partially sun-soaked Shoreline Amphitheater and learned what Google has been working on lately, and what it means for the gadgets and gizmos about to be unleashed on the world. Buried in among the messaging apps, VR headsets and developer tools was a common theme -- in 2016, machines are smart. And they're going to get a lot smarter than we're used to -- and maybe more than we're comfortable with. We can't dismiss the excitement around Google Daydream VR -- the answer to "affordable" consumer virtual reality applications and one of the physical products we're going to be able to buy. And we shouldn't dismiss them!

A dialog system is a computational agent that engages in interactions with humans which spans over multiple turns or sentences using human language in form of speech or text. Over the last few years dialog systems have been gaining increasing interest in research and business spheres. Dialog systems are widely used for customer services responding to questions about products and services, help desks catering to internal employee questions, financial advisors answering questions about investments and taxes, website navigation to guide customers to relevant portions of complex websites, guided selling by providing assistance in sales process, and technical support for diagnosis and troubleshooting in call centres. More recent trends have been seeing emergence of ubiquitous personal assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, Amazon Echo, Microsoft's Cortana, Braina (application developed by Brainasoft for Microsoft Windows), Samsung's S Voice, LG's Voice Mate, BlackBerry's Assistant, SILVIA, HTC's Hidi, IBM's Watson_(computer), and Facebook's M. Generally, these systems are developed for a specific application handling a particular class of interaction, they are expected to evolve with significant dialog capability over the next few years. Research in dialog systems has focused on the semantics and pragmatics of dialog, hand-crafted designs, computational linguistics, evaluation of dialog systems, and standardization across research community. Dialog systems across different applications encounter huge variability in the nature of task/application (e.g.

Criteo is the world leader in performance Internet advertising. The Recommender System is at the core of its Engine. Real-time prediction: Everybody predicts clicks. But how do you accurately predict if the userâ s click on a product will generate a sale? Thankfully, you have billions of data points to help you.

This year's I/O was a big one. Among other things, the Mountain View, California company announced its Daydream VR platform for Android, an evolution of the Google Now assistant in the form of an AI-powered "Google Assistant," a couple of new messaging apps and some hardware to play the part of debuting the Assistant, a new version of Android Wear, and more. The keynote had this overarching theme that Google is no longer just a company that does search and ads. Now, Google is diving head first into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and most of the things that were announced in the keynote fell into that narrative for the most part. This is the stuff that's not coming out for at least half a year.

This year's I/O was a big one. Among other things, the Mountain View, California company announced its Daydream VR platform for Android, an evolution of the Google Now assistant in the form of an AI-powered "Google Assistant," a couple of new messaging apps and some hardware to play the part of debuting the Assistant, a new version of Android Wear, and more. The keynote had this overarching theme that Google is no longer just a company that does search and ads. Now, Google is diving head first into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and most of the things that were announced in the keynote fell into that narrative for the most part. This is the stuff that's not coming out for at least half a year.

Sundar Pichai made a bold statement in a letter to shareholders. After describing the evolution of computers since the nineties, from hulking desktop machines to petite portable devices, he wrote, "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away." His point was that, because computing technology is becoming smaller and more powerful, computers can be built in all kinds of forms. Building devices is no longer hard. The difficult part--and the part that will distinguish products from one another--is the experience that computers facilitate.

At its 10th annual I/O developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants doubled down on artificial intelligence as the next big phase of computing. Machine learning was a common thread in Google's latest products and launches - Google Home, Google's Assistant, Duo and Allo, and Instant Apps. As the event unfolded, it outlined Pichai's vision of what kind of company Google wants to be. Every decade, a new era of computing arrives that pretty much shapes everything we do. During the event, Pichai noted that saying that Google aims to be more assistive and provide a more ambient experience.

It's a reflection of Google's Search and AI advances, an answer to Alexa, an imitation of nothing else precisely and an echo of Amazon's home assistant ambitions. Google introduced it during I/O 2016, and it's what the company simply calls Google Home. It's a front, more so a frontier maybe, that Amazon set out into first, but Google Home is packed with enough promise to serve a serious challenge to the Echo early on. Chromecast has been one of the hottest consumer products since its launch day, and Google Home will build on that success, stated Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google, during a presentation at I/O 2016. "Google Home is a Wi-Fi speaker that streams music directly from the cloud so you get the highest quality playback," said Queiroz.

Meet Jill Watson, a first-time teaching assistant at Georgia Tech assigned to moderate an online forum for a computer science class. Jill was 1 of 9 TAs assigned to help answer questions about coursework and projects from the 300 students enrolled in the advanced course. During the first few weeks in January, Jill really struggled. This was Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, after all, a course with the goal to "build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." It was also a requirement for graduate students to earn their master's degree. It's no surprise then that she needed some coaching, especially since feedback is so critical to student success.

It's hard to make a right turn down San Francisco's crowded streets these days without running into a story about bots, conversational commerce, or conversational commerce bots. Bots have reached kale levels of hype. But amidst the noise, there's something real going on here -- we just have to decipher it. You may have heard of conversational commerce -- it's a catchall term for a future of technology driven by messaging (and voice) interactions that transcend current communications modalities. It's a convenient moniker but also confusing because there isn't one trend to follow.