Facebook's new chatbots still need work and other top stories.

• Facebook's new chatbots still need work

  Facebook debuted chatbots for Messenger this week to much fanfare, promising consumers a new way to interact with their favorite businesses over the company’s popular messaging service. The idea is that Messenger users could simply “chat” with these automated software programs to do things like read the latest news from CNN, get a weather report or even go shopping. In practice, however, the bots — at least at launch — failed to live up to the hype. Trying to use the bots for simple tasks — li..

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• Google Calendar's new feature could help you get a six pack (or not) video - CNET

  

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• NASA Details Game Plan to Deploy Expandable Fabric Space Habitat at Space Station

  

  A giant inflatable room that astronauts may one day use to live on Mars will be put to the test beginning this weekend at the International Space Station. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, called BEAM for short, is a first-of-its-kind inflatable ...

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• Amazon Kindle Oasis hands-on: This is the best-looking and most expensive Kindle yet video - CNET

  

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• Facebook hires Google 'moonshot' exec for R&D

  

  Facebook's Regina Dugan(Photo: Weinberg-Clark Photography)SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is stealing some of Google's moonshot magic.Facebook on Wednesday said it has hired Regina Dugan — who helped shape such Google initiatives as Project Tango (3-D mapping capability for mobile devices), Project Ara (tools for building modular smartphones) and smart fabrics wired with electronics — to head a research-and-product-development group considered vital to Facebook's 10-year technology road map.She reports..

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• Facebook Unveils Plans to Bring Internet to Both Cities and Rural Areas

  

  Facebook revealed more details about its ambitious plans to bring the Internet to the rural world as well as metropolitan cities. Speaking at Facebook’s annual coder conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the company’s vice president of infrastructure engineering, Jay Parikh, outlined several new research projects from Facebook’s Connectivity Lab. The Connectivity Lab is an in-house Facebook research unit supporting the social network’s Internet.org initiative meant to bring the Internet to ..

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• Facebook's latest AI experiments: generating captions and recognizing faces in videos

  

  At its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, Facebook demonstrated its latest artificial intelligence (AI) research efforts. Not surprisingly, they are about video. Video implies a whole bunch of individual images put together. So it logically flows from Facebook’s progress around object recognition and image caption generation using AI. “You can imagine us building image search on steroids,” Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s director of Applied Machine Learning, said onstage toda..

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• Octopus slips out of aquarium tank, crawls across floor, escapes down pipe to ocean

  

  Inky the octopus, the escapee from New Zealand’s National Aquarium. (Courtesy of the National Aquarium of New Zealand) Inky the octopus didn’t even try to cover his tracks. By the time the staff at New Zealand’s National Aquarium noticed that he was missing, telltale suction cup prints were the main clue to an easily solved mystery. Inky had said see ya to his tank-mate, slipped through a gap left by maintenance workers at the top of his enclosure and, as evidenced by the tracks, made his w..

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