Scientists from UNSW and Botanic Gardens of Sydney have trained AI to unlock data from millions of plant specimens kept in herbaria around the world, to study and combat the impacts of climate change on flora. "Herbarium collections are amazing time capsules of plant specimens," says lead author on the study, Associate Professor Will Cornwell. "Each year over 8000 specimens are added to the National Herbarium of New South Wales alone, so it's not possible to go through things manually anymore." Using a new machine learning algorithm to process over 3000 leaf samples, the team discovered that contrary to frequently observed interspecies patterns, leaf size doesn't increase in warmer climates within a single species. Published in the American Journal of Botany, this research not only reveals that factors other than climate have a strong effect on leaf size within a plant species, but demonstrates how AI can be used to transform static specimen collections and to quickly and effectively document climate change effects.

Mobile chat is where it's okay to be dumb. Your LinkedIn page may be a work of art wrought in HR-friendly prose; your tweets, so sharp you could shave with them. Let the autocorrect errors fly! Isn't that what old people do? In fact, why use words at all when any number of pictographic pokes, nods, and grunts available at the press of a button will get the job done faster?

Emoji have become an integral part of the way we communicate in the digital space, and libraries of figures and expressions are ever-growing. But wouldn't it be great if you could translate your own features rather than settling for a rough approximation? Google's newest Allo feature is here to do just that by turning user selfies into emoji. Machine learning technology -- which is beginning to more closely mimic human learning -- is behind the new feature on Google chat app Allo that translates selfies into wild illustrations. In its Thursday exclusive, Fast Company reported the feature is now accessible when users pull up the stickers function to respond to a message.

It lives inside of Allo, Google's ML-driven chat app. Starting today, when you pull up the list of stickers you can use to respond to someone, there's a simple little option: "Turn a selfie into stickers." Tap, and it prompts you to take a selfie. Then, Google's image-recognition algorithms analyze your face, mapping each of your features to those in a kit illustrated by Lamar Abrams, a storyboard artist, writer, and designer for the critically acclaimed Cartoon Network series Steven Universe. There are, of course, literally hundreds of eyes and noses and face shapes and hairstyles and glasses available. All told, Google thinks there are 563 quadrillion faces that the tool could generate.

Siri--and all her artificially intelligent peers--are increasingly taking on more tasks for people at home and at work. But as impressive as these digital assistants can be, they're still very much in their infancy. "I don't think anyone has nailed the user experience yet," warns Jason Cornwell, who leads the team at Google tasked with designing exactly that. Still, the biggest players in artificial intelligence (A.I.) agree on some important design lessons. Cornwell shared a stage with execs from Slack, Facebook, and Microsoft on Thursday at Fast Company's Innovation Festival in New York City.

Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are betting on chatbots and virtual assistants as the mechanism through which AI will enter our lives. And while Google Allo or Facebook's M might work within a one-on-one chat situation, what happens when chatbots make the leap to group chat, a much more complex social interaction? They need to be polite--or at least not creepy. That was the consensus at the 2016 Fast Company Innovation Festival, where Lili Cheng, General Manager at Microsoft Research, Jason Cornwell, the Communications UX Designer at Google, Jeremy Goldberg, a Product Designer at Facebook who worked on its chatbot M, and Noah Weiss, head of the Search, Learning, and Intelligence Group at Slack, joined Fast Company's Cliff Kuang to discuss AI's next challenges. You're chatting with a group of people you've met recently, and you're making plans to see each other again.

Let the Great Messaging War of 2017 begin. Today, Google is launching Allo, a revamped messaging app meant to compete with the likes of Apple Messages and Facebook Messenger--two products that in recent months have steadily unveiled a slew of new features. Google thinks it could leapfrog them both, thanks to its most valuable assets: a wealth of data about what we do and search for online, and the billions of dollars it has invested in machine learning. When you message people, Allo creates smart replies akin to those found in Inbox--but those smart replies are carefully calibrated to both the content and context of your conversation. So, for example, if someone sends you a picture of them skydiving, you can immediately tap on a series of well-tuned responses: "So brave," "How fun," and "So exciting!"