Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week. The company released an official apology after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade, likening feminism to cancer and suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. Related: Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter The bot, known as Tay, 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 fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the disastrous experiment, Microsoft initially only gave a terse statement, saying Tay was a "learning machine" and "some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it."

Google parent Alphabet Inc. is dismantling its robotics effort after less than three years and aims to sell Boston Dynamics, the legged-robot maker that was the centerpiece of the program, according to people familiar with the matter. The moves reflect internal disagreements about the direction of Boston Dynamics and concerns about Alphabet's ability to make money from robots as the company increases its scrutiny of costs, said the...

The paper presents some key lessons and "folk wisdom" that machine learning researchers and practitioners have learnt from experience and which are hard to find in textbooks. The fundamental goal of machine learning is to generalize beyond the training set. The data used to evaluate the model must be kept separate from the data used to learn the model. When we use generalization as a goal, we do not have access to a function that we can optimize. So we have to use training error as a proxy for test error.

This implementation uses an LSTM controller. NTM models with multiple read/write heads are supported.

Microsoft said its researchers created Tay as an experiment to learn more about computers and human conversation. On its website, the company said the program was targeted to an audience of 18-to 24-year-olds and was "designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation".

Flirtey, the startup that did the first FAA-sanctioned drone delivery in a rural area, has replicated the feat in an urban setting. It sent out an autonomous hexacopter on a half-a-mile flight to an empty house in Hawthorne, Nevada on March 10th, carrying food, water and a first-aid kit in a box attached to a rope. It's probably not the most secure way to transport fragile objects, though, so Amazon might have to devise another method to deliver TVs or anything breakable. The drone flew with zero human intervention -- there was a pilot on standby in case things go awry, but the team programmed its flight path beforehand.

Analytics is becoming critical in all part of our lives. Biostatistics has been a big driver of this analytics demand in the field of pharmaceuticals, biotech, health & medicine. Biostatistics (or biometry) is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology. The science of biostatistics encompasses the design of biological experiments, especially in medicine, pharmacy, agriculture and fishery; the collection, summarization, and analysis of data from those experiments; and the interpretation of, and inference from, the results. A major branch of this is medical biostatistics,[1] which is exclusively concerned with medicine and health.

At BigML we believe that over the next few years automated, data-driven decisions and data-driven applications are going to change the world. In fact, we think it will be the biggest shift in business efficiency since the dawn of the office calculator, when individuals had "Computer" listed as the title on their business card. We want to help people rapidly and easily create predictive models using their datasets, no matter what size they are. Our easy-to-use, public API is a great step in that direction but a few bindings for popular languages is obviously a big bonus. Thus, we are very happy to announce an open source Python binding to BigML.io, the BigML REST API. You can find it and fork it at Github.

A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, 'Bush did 9/11?-proclaiming Developers at Microsoft created'Tay', an AI modelled to speak'like a teen girl', in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as'The AI with zero chill' – and that she certainly is. To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe. She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being'creepy' or'super weird'.

Sometimes a correlation means absolutely nothing, and is purely accidental (especially when you compute millions of correlations among thousands of variables) or it can be explained by confounding factors. For instance, the fact that the cost of electricity is correlated to how much people spend on education, is explained by a confounding factor: inflation, which makes both electricity and education costs grow over time. This confounding factor has a bigger influence than true causal factors, such as more administrators / government-funded student loans boosting college tuition. Even when there is a correlation that can be leveraged to solve a problem, for example a drug that was found to be better than placebo to help with a medical condition, it may work well for some people, and not well for others: the correlation is not universally strong. Also, causation only matters in specific contexts such as root cause analysis, where you need to fix the cause.