Chatbots are here to stay. While a year ago, many in the tech industry saw this as yet another Silicon Valley fad that was more hype than substance, that debate has largely been put to rest now. Today bots are being deployed by major companies in almost every sector. But now, there is an intra-bot war brewing in the bot community. In October, we conducted a webinar on the fall of mobile apps and the rise of bots which had 145 attendees.

Russia is carrying out a sustained campaign of cyber attacks targeting democracy and critical infrastructure in the West, UK Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon has warned. Moscow was "weaponising misinformation" in a bid to expand its influence and destabilise Western governments and weaken Nato, he said. Vladimir Putin had chosen to become a "strategic competitor" of the West. Sir Michael said it was vital alliance members strengthened cyber defences. His speech, at the University of St Andrews, comes as Theresa May is to use an informal summit in Malta to press EU Nato members to boost defence spending.

Nato must begin to compete on the cyber-battlefield to counter Russian hacking aimed at undermining democracy in the US and western Europe, the British defence secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, has said. In his most hard-hitting comments yet about Russia, he accused it of targeting the US, France, Germany, Holland, Bulgaria and Montenegro, which is due to become a full Nato member this year. Fallon blamed Russia for helping create the age of fake information. "Today we see a country that, in weaponising misinformation, has created what we might now see as the post-truth age. Part of that is the use of cyber-weaponry to disrupt critical infrastructure and disable democratic machinery," he said.

At some online publications, financial summaries and sports recaps are written by artificial intelligence (AI), not humans. In the medical field, thanks to "computer-assisted diagnosis," a computer was able to spot 52% of breast cancers based on mammography scans up to one year before the women were officially diagnosed. In some organizations, AI decides which sales opportunities are worthy of a salesperson's time. Gartner client inquiry on topics closely related to AI tripled from 2015 to 2016. As organizations recognize the potential for AI to disrupt business, interest is growing rapidly.

Bayesian probability theory states that it's possible to predict with surprising accuracy the likelihood of something happening (or not happening) in a transparent and analytically defensible way. A Bayesian inference network, or model, captures every element of a problem and calculates possible outcomes mathematically. The harder the problem, the better it works--at least in theory. In reality, a typical approach is to gather a roomful of PhDs and spend a lot of time and money building a Bayesian network. Then, with even greater effort and more man-hours, the Bayesian network is turned into software by a roomful of coders.

Our SMS search engine, called Text Engine, was originally created in 2013. The idea was to create a utility that would enable users to search the Web without needing to use a web browser and without using data. Text Engine accomplishes this by giving you access to vital, basic web information just by sending and receiving text messages. To keep Text Engine relevant for an ever-changing mobile market, our investors suggested that we think about adding a chatbot experience to Text Engine. So that's what we did.

Engineers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have developed a new online energy management system (EMS) that they say can improve PHEV fuel efficiency by more than 30%. In "Development and Evaluation of an Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Online Energy Management System for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles," published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Xuewei Qi and colleagues explain that improving the efficiency of current PHEVs is limited by shortfalls in their energy management systems (EMS), which control the power split between engine and battery. In general, existing EMS for PHEVs are either rule-based systems, which use a set of predefined rules, or optimization-based, which can adapt according to driving conditions and driver behavior. However, notes the UCR team, most systems have only limited adaptability to real-time information. "In reality, drivers may switch routes, traffic can be unpredictable, and road conditions may change, meaning that the EMS must source that information in real-time," Qi said.

Natural language is a fundamental element of bot technologies. As a result, there has been a direct correlation between the evolution of bot platforms and natural language processing platforms. While the evolution of bot technologies has been driven by the messaging platform vendors such as Facebook or WeChat, the main advancements in natural language processing technologies is coming from cloud platform and service providers like Microsoft, Google and IBM. As a result, most bot developers spend time integrating their frontend bot applications with natural language processing services provided by a different platform. During this Meetup we will discuss the two main natural language programming techniques that have become popular with bot technologies as well as the key differences between a rule-based bot and AI bot.

Meanwhile the leader of Communist China rebranded his prickly protectionist power as the defender of globalisation and shared values. So after week one in this upside down new world, how stands China's bid for global leadership? A week is just a week, but when it comes to strategic focus, China is on course. It's easier to look laser sharp when the competition is in disarray. Here the internal difficulties of the US and the European Union are helpful to China.

Reading Data Science – Machine Learning vs Rules Based Systems by Karthik Guruswamy Data Scientist at Teradata got me thinking about how machine learning is replacing rule-based systems in how we manage and use enterprise content, knowledge, and ideas. These types of rules are extremely easy to understand and easy to code. But, Karthik points out, things quickly get out of hand: "When a system gets operationalized, one starts with 100 scenarios with 100 rules to handle it. As time goes by we encounter more and more exceptions and start making more rules to keep exceptions under control. Think US Tax Code – things get unwieldy and cumbersome over time."