It was the unspooling of an unfortunate series of events involving artificial intelligence, human nature, and a very public experiment. Amid this dangerous combination of forces, determining exactly what went wrong is near-impossible. But the bottom line is simple: Microsoft has awful lot of egg on its face after unleashing an online chat bot that Twitter users coaxed into regurgitating some seriously offensive language, including pointedly racist and sexist remarks. On Wednesday morning, the company unveiled Tay, a chat bot meant to mimic the verbal tics of a 19-year-old American girl, provided to the world at large via the messaging platforms Twitter, Kik and GroupMe. According to Microsoft, the aim was to "conduct research on conversational understanding."

Yahoo is today announcing the release of a large-scale data set that describes people's usage of news feeds on several of the company's web services, including Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The idea is to empower machine learning researchers in academia with very rich data. The release of data is not, in and of itself, new for Yahoo -- there have been 56 previous releases in the Yahoo Labs Webscope program, which encompasses advertising, image, social, and ratings data, among other categories. This data set in particular covers 20 million people over the course of four months in 2015, and shows the types of devices people used to visit pages, how far down they got in the articles, and the top subjects of articles. There is data on people's locations, their ages (in some cases), and their gender -- all in an anonymized way. What's interesting about today's release is the size of the data set: 13.5TB.

The recent open sourcing of Google's TensorFlow was a significant event for machine learning. While the original release was lacking in some ways, development continues and improvements are already being made.

From one of the grandmasters of digital art comes an explosion of the most interesting images the world's ever seen. Using next generation neural networks, Pikazo works the way your brain does to rip apart and assemble image details into something new and extraordinary. Created by the image scientist behind landmark visuals seen in the Myst games, The Matrix films, 300, and Second Life, Pikazo lets anyone create and share beautiful artwork.

Human beings who design intelligent computers have a long history of getting those computers to beat other humans at games to prove how great their computers are. Think IBM's Deep Blue taking down chess legend Garry Kasparov, or the same company's Watson cleaning house on Jeopardy! But there is one game that artificial intelligence has long struggled to master: Go, a board game with roots in ancient China. Go players pick either black stones or white stones, with each player placing one stone of their color every turn. The idea is to capture and remove an opponent's stones by surrounding them with your own.

In turn, Google will contribute to Movidius' neural network technology roadmap. This agreement enables Google to deploy its advanced neural computation engine on Movidius' ultra-low-power platform, introducing a new way for machine intelligence to run locally on devices. Local computation allows for data to stay on device and properly function without internet connection and with fewer latency issues. This means future products can have the ability to understand images and audio with incredible speed and accuracy, offering a more personal and contextualized computing experience. "What Google has been able to achieve with neural networks is providing us with the building blocks for machine intelligence, laying the groundwork for the next decade of how technology will enhance the way people interact with the world," said Blaise Ag?era y Arcas, head of Google's machine intelligence group in Seattle.

Twitter trolls made a dummy out of Microsoft's artificial intelligence chat robot, which learns through public interaction, by turning it into a pro-Nazi racist within a day of its launch. Tay, the artificial intelligence (AI) robot, had a bug in which it would at first repeat racist comments, then it began to incorporate the language in its own tweets. The tweets have been deleted, Tay has been paused, and Microsoft said it's "making some adjustments," the International Business Times reported. "Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you," Tay's information page states on Twitter.

Linear regression is perhaps one of the most well known and well understood algorithms in statistics and machine learning. In this post you will discover the linear regression algorithm, how it works and how you can best use it in on your machine learning projects. You do not need to know any statistics or linear algebra to understand linear regression. This is a gentle high-level introduction to the technique to give you enough background to be able to use it effectively on your own problems. Linear Regression for Machine Learning Photo by Nicolas Raymond, some rights reserved.

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA. The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms. Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.

I know everybody thinks that artificial intelligence, the phenomenon, not the mediocre Steven Spielberg film, is going to be the end of humanity because it's going to become self-aware one day and decide to exterminate the human race. Well it turns out that A.I. will indeed want to kill humans, but only because we taught it to. This is the Twitter account of Tay, Microsoft's teen girl AI system that was supposed to learn how to speak like your average teenage girl. What was unique about Tay was that she was going to be taught entirely from her interactions with other people on the internet. It was an exercise Microsoft partook in to improve its customer service software as well as a huge PR opportunity.