Microsoft has blamed a "co-ordinated attack" by Twitter users for the racist and other offensive comments spouted by an automatedBillionaire Says Smarter Tech Will Destroy Jobs At a Record Clip. Read more ... » chatbot it released on the social networkMicrosoft's HoloLens award recipients, Instagram client pulled from iOS store,…. The claim came as the softwareMicrosoft Integrates Cortana, Power BI. Read more ... » company was forced into a strenuous apology for the tweets sent out by its artificialMicrosoft and I can see that this blog post displeases you. Read more ... » characterHow Imperson Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Bring Miss Piggy To Life. Read more ... », called Tay.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted). Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014.

In much the same way businesses have been eager to use big data analytics to improve their operations, many companies have paid a lot of interest to the growing field of machine learning. Unlike some other tech trends that have come and gone, machine learning appears to be more than just some fad. The recent rise in the number of machine learning SaaS solutions launched in 2015 shows that this development has genuine staying power. Machine learning products are on the rise as well, and as organizations become more familiar with the concept, the demand will almost certainly increase. While much has been made over what affects machine learning can have on the world and businesses in particular, it's equally important to look at the impact it may have on IT departments.

In this multi-part series, we'll look at upcoming trends in marketing in 2016 you should be prepared to address. Machine learning has been a goal of computer scientists and engineers since the 1950s, but only in the last 5 years has it become accessible to more people. Prior to the democratization of machine learning, advanced technologies were limited to the biggest computer science companies and laboratories, only for corporations with the biggest budgets. In short, it's a discipline of computer science in which machines teach themselves, learn from data, and change their programming as data changes. Machine learning means machines figure out how to recognize patterns and adapt to them.

IN 1996 IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a game of chess against one of its computers, Deep Blue. Mr Kasparov, regarded as one of the best-ever players, won--but Deep Blue won the rematch. Two decades on, computers are much better than humans at chess but remain amateurs when it comes to the much tougher, ancient game of Go. Or at least, they did. Now a computer has managed to thrash a top-drawer human player.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent (and hilarious) Robotics Challenge. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape. Seriously, check out that cool chart at the top (much bigger version at DARPA's site if you want to print out the poster – 56k warning): everything is spoken for right up to the border with microwave frequencies, and more gadgets are crowding into each one daily. "The current practice of assigning fixed frequencies for various uses irrespective of actual, moment-to-moment demand is simply too inefficient to keep up with actual demand and threatens to undermine wireless reliability," said William Chappell, director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, in a DARPA press release.

Microsoft's Tay shows that if we treat newborn AI programs as mature, they can be instantly corrupted. If we don't instill ethics or morals into newly created bots, just as we do with our children, they will digest and spit back the worst of humanity unthinkingly. And while artificially intelligent bots may not deliberately start shooting to kill, they could unintentionally precipitate human disasters, say, a genocide, because of a lack of ethical principles. The time has come to consider who will be the guardian of AI. This is not the first time the debate about ethics of AI has surfaced.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is expected to be the next big thing in technology, and many tech companies are investing heavily to make sure they don't lose out on opportunities as and when the technology becomes more mainstream in the coming years. While AI has already started intriguing and exciting industry insiders and tech enthusiasts alike, the increasing chatter surrounding the new technology has given rise to multiple concerns regarding job losses and science fiction-like scenarios of AI-enabled robots starting to exert control over humans, eventually taking over the planet, not unlike the dystopian sci-fi movie'I, Robot'. While Alphabet Chairman, Mr. Eric Schmidt, has already admitted that jobs may be at stake because of artificial intelligence, the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, recently categorically denied that AI-enabled robots are about to take over the planet any time soon. Whatever be the case, most established technology companies are diving into AI-related research headlong, and while American tech giants like Google and Facebook are already burning the midnight oil on research related to artificial intelligence, South Korean conglomerate, Samsung, is also spending the big bucks by investing in a number of tech startups worldwide, in an effort to increase its presence in the sector. According to reports in the South Korean media, Samsung Venture Investment, which happens to be a subsidiary of the Samsung Group and hence, a sister concern for Samsung Electronics, has already invested a truckload of money in more than ten global tech companies, all of which are deeply involved in AI-related research.

Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014. XiaoIce has had more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident.

Everyone in business wants to know what's going to happen in the future, and for some time now Ford has been investing in futurism, an evolving academic and professional discipline. The need for this was particularly evident after the Business Insider Transportation team in New York spent a few days at the New York Auto Show, asking everyone to predict was will happen in 2016 -- and beyond. The car business these days is all about change: automakers becoming "mobility providers," electric cars potentially displacing gas-powered vehicles, even autos driving themselves. Heck, even Apple may get in on the action. For nearly a decade, Sheryl Connelly has been Ford's manager of global consumer trends and futuring.