Can a system finds it’s own flaws and patch them autonomously? – CognitionX Data Science, AI and Machine Learning Briefing

Football is easy for humans to pick up, but to have a humanoid robot running around a field on two legs, seeing and taking control of the ball, communicating under pressure with teammates, and all mostly without falling over, was considered completely out of the question in 1997 when chess grand master and world champion Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. Now, they have their own league.

The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge – The research wing of the US military has picked the seven teams who will compete to build machine-learning software that can find and patch bugs automatically to fend off hackers.

Good listen – the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky stress that Numenta is specifically trying to reverse engineer only part of the human brain: The neocortex, which is what lets us learn and create a model of the world based on our environments and experiences. The company is officially uninterested in engineering the 25 percent of the brain that controls emotions like anger.

350,000 square feet of floor space.

9,000 residents in a new Facebook town.

12,000 pieces of art.

1 incredibly talented AI.

You may have heard about the Donald Trump bot army and the Twitter bots that have influenced elections in Latin America, but there are other bots out there, bots that connect citizens to services, bots that plan to crowdsource the election of a president or act as your personal assistant in government.

Bots won’t just upend business and the App Store. They’re going to change civil society, how people interact with government, and the self-governance of free societies. Here are five example of bots that have already impacted or will impact democracy.

Watch this hyper efficient robot, known as DURUS, going for a walk. It’s got a swagger that is much less unnerving than the Boston Dynamics’ PETMAN.

What will life be like in 2066? Which movie has do you think has made the closest prediction? We put this to our Data Experts over dinner on Tuesday and the answers were thought provoking! So, we thought we’d put the same question to you. The poll results will be in Friday’s newsletter.

ThoughtMachine; a company led by ex-Google engineer Paul Taylor, has been built to perform the core function of a bank: essentially, maintaining a huge ledger. That’s something that a blockchain is uniquely suited to doing, of course. Find out what Tech Crunch think of Vault OS…

Researchers from the USC Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory are working together with autism research leaders to exploring whether machine learning might play an important role in helping screen for autism and guide caregiver and practitioner intervention.

• Chief Data Scientist for a new marketplace startup
• Growth Hacker, marketing Exec at a new startup
• CTO and Group IT Director of Global hospitality group
• Co Founding CTO at an Agri Tech Startup
• Data Engineer for Image Processing startup