It's standing room only in a swirly-carpeted room at the conference centre attached to the Mandalay Bay hotel – yes, that one – in Las Vegas. "CES 2017 brought the whoa," appears on screen, followed by a sequence of fast-cut shots of robots, drones and VR headsets. So get ready for more whoa than ever before." If this year's Consumer Electronics Show is anything to go by, it's less "whoa, that's awesome" and more "whoa there, do we really need this?" The annual tech trade show seems less about real innovation breakthroughs solving unmet needs and more about incrementally improved nice-to-haves for the 1%. The technology industry does not appear to have learned from all of the soul-searching it did last year in the wake of the demise of companies like Juicero, which made a $400 internet-connected juice-maker that attracted $120m in funding. The company folded six months after Bloomberg showed that its pre-portioned fruit and veg packets could be squeezed just as effectively by hand.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence division, AI Labs, has joined hands with Taiwanese fabless chipmaker MediaTek to collaborate on Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, including building a voice-controlled smart home ecosystem. "Our AI and cloud computing capabilities, along with MediaTek's cutting-edge technology in chip design, provide unique advantages to our connectivity solutions for smart homes," Miffy Chan, head of Alibaba AI Labs, said in a statement. The partnership comes after the two companies collaborated for Tmall Genie, the voice-controlled smart home assistant launched by Alibaba AI Labs in July last year. MediaTech provided chip technology support for Tmall Genie. More than one million Tmall Genie devices were sold in China during Alibaba's Global Shopping Festival in November last year.

IBM received 9,043 patents in 2017, breaking the record it set in 2016, the company said on Tuesday. A lot of the research that IBM conducts may not translate to immediate business gains, and it could take years before patents turn into a product that pays off. The company also invests in exploratory research unrelated to business lines and goals. Despite winning the most patents for the 25th straight year, IBM is struggling to turn itself around. Slowing sales in older business lines have hurt total revenue, while growth in newer areas - including cloud, AI and cybersecurity software - hasn't yet closed the gap.

A number of Chinese mobile applications have been shut down after it was revealed women on their platforms were actually automated robots, it's reported. According to the Modern Express newspaper, police have closed down mobile apps associated with 21 companies and arrested more than 600 suspects operating across 13 provinces, after discovering that messages from some women were being automatically generated by computer programmes. Police in southern Guangdong province began investigating in August 2017, after suspecting one app of fraudulently charging visitors to view pornographic videos which did not exist. Further investigation found that technical personnel from at least one company had created fake "sexy girl" accounts. They wrote computer programmes which generated greeting messages and compliments from fake accounts, and targeted these at newly registered users.

Alexa really could soon be everywhere - including your car. At the annual Vegas tech gathering CES dozens of firms have revealed the smart assistant is coming to everything from dashboards to power chargers, bringing the smart assistant war to cars. Amazon's new Alexa Onboard technology will let users access the Alexa voice assistant through their car's infotainment system. That means drivers or passengers can play music, ask for directions or get other information simply by speaking to the car's audio system. Several firms also revealed Alexa'dongles', many that double as chargers, at CES.

Technology innovators intensified efforts over the last year to secure intellectual property rights on transformative technologies ranging from AI to blockchain platforms. While IBM maintained its overwhelming lead in U.S. patent awards, Chinese manufacturers continue to make steady progress gaining control of IP while the growth rate for patent awards in machine learning soared. An annual patent survey released by IFI Claims Patent Services found that machine-learning patent applications are among the fastest growing categories. Larry Cady, a senior analyst with IFI, estimates the patent category that includes machine learning and neural networks grew at a 34 percent annual rate over the last five years. "I don't see that trend slowing," Cady added in an interview.

CES press day, the day before the opening of the gargantuan consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, is traditionally anchored by the "big" consumer electronics manufacturers. The names change, but these days, that list includes Korea's LG and Samsung, and Japan's Panasonic, with China's TCL waving its flag as well. These flashy presentations typically focus on the television display. Inevitably, manufacturers would unveil a new display or two, claiming they were the biggest, thinnest, prettiest, or most colorful--or all of the above. If you were dropping into your first CES from another planet, you might not actually realize from the announcements at CES press day that TVs have screens.

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The field of Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an active area of research within Artificial Intelligence, with an increasingly important impact in industrial and other real-world applications. Within a MAS, autonomous agents interact to pursue personal interests and/or to achieve common objectives. Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) have emerged as one of the prominent agent architectures to govern the agents' autonomous behavior, where both algorithms and communication models are driven by the structure of the specific problem. During the last decade, several extensions to the DCOP model have enabled them to support MAS in complex, real-time, and uncertain environments. This survey aims at providing an overview of the DCOP model, giving a classification of its multiple extensions and addressing both resolution methods and applications that find a natural mapping within each class of DCOPs. The proposed classification suggests several future perspectives for DCOP extensions, and identifies challenges in the design of efficient resolution algorithms, possibly through the adaptation of strategies from different areas.

We propose a new multivariate dependency measure. It is obtained by considering a Gaussian kernel based distance between the copula transform of the given d-dimensional distribution and the uniform copula and then appropriately normalizing it. The resulting measure is shown to satisfy a number of desirable properties. A nonparametric estimate is proposed for this dependency measure and its properties (finite sample as well as asymptotic) are derived. Some comparative studies of the proposed dependency measure estimate with some widely used dependency measure estimates on artificial datasets are included. A non-parametric test of independence between two or more random variables based on this measure is proposed. A comparison of the proposed test with some existing nonparametric multivariate test for independence is presented.