There is no denying that we are entering a new phase in how technology helps to connect brands with consumers. We are moving from visual interfaces to text and voice. Speaking to our devices like we speak to our friends, family and colleagues. As messenger apps secure the lion's share of our connected time, customers will increasingly expect and want to interact with brands in these channels. And Facebook, and Viber, and Kik, want to connect you with brands on their platform, like (most of) China does on WeChat which has 800 million users and millions of services available within the app.

Competition may be good for the soul, but so is collaboration. Samsung said at an earnings call earlier Wednesday that working with its often-partner, sometimes-rival Google will make artificial intelligence better on a range of devices. "Samsung and Google will have to continue to maintain their strategic partnership to nurture the AI and the market for the emerging technology," Samsung Mobile VP Lee Kyeong-tae said, as reported by The Investor, a South Korean publication associated with The Korea Herald. The call to collaborate comes at a time when Samsung is rumored to bring the AI assistant "Bixby" to its Galaxy S8 phone this April. The use of AI is heating up on phones, with phonemakers from Huawei to HTC introducing their own takes.

School choice programs are implemented to give students/parents an opportunity to choose the public school the students attend. Controlled school choice programs need to provide choices for students/parents while maintaining distributional constraints on the composition of students, typically in terms of socioeconomic status. Previous works show that setting soft-bounds, which flexibly change the priorities of students based on their types, is more appropriate than setting hard-bounds, which strictly limit the number of accepted students for each type. We consider a case where soft-bounds are imposed and one student can belong to multiple types, e.g., financially-distressed and minority types. We first show that when we apply a model that is a straightforward extension of an existing model for disjoint types, there is a chance that no stable matching exists. Thus we propose an alternative model and an alternative stability definition, where a school has reserved seats for each type. We show that a stable matching is guaranteed to exist in this model and develop a mechanism called Deferred Acceptance for Overlapping Types (DA-OT). The DA-OT mechanism is strategy-proof and obtains the student-optimal matching within all stable matchings. Furthermore, we introduce an extended model that can handle both type-specific ceilings and floors and propose a extended mechanism DA-OT* to handle the extended model. Computer simulation results illustrate that DA-OT outperforms an artificial cap mechanism where we set a hard-bound for each type in each school. DA-OT* can achieve stability in the extended model without sacrificing students welfare.

Robots are about convenience, so why do we fear them? They bring us a better life and freedom from repetitive tasks. When I have children one day, I want them to grow up with helpful robots. What can Alexa or Pepper or Kuri be in ten years time? Alexa is my conversational partner of choice.

Artificial intelligence holds the key to a new era of innovation, one where computers begin to work intelligently on our behalf rather than under our command. It's an era where technology will become more intuitive, more conversational, more intelligent, will enable businesses to better know and serve their customers in ways previously unimaginable, and ultimately help solve some of the planet's biggest challenges. Microsoft is helping to lead a growing global conversation around AI's transformative potential. Last week, Harry Shum, executive vice president, Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, spoke at Future Forum in Beijing, China. This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared how Microsoft is democratizing AI for everyone at DLD in Munich, Germany, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Ever since algorithms began recognizing patterns faster and better than humans, computers have been making doctors' lives easier and diagnoses more accurate. But widely used tools like automated cell counters, which can quickly point to diseases like malaria and leukemia by getting a head count on different kind of blood cells, are beginning to look quaint next to the deep learning and neural networks coming online. Today, hospitals can outfit their existing computer systems with a $1,000 graphics processor and speed-boost their capacity up to 260 million images per day. That's basically equivalent to all the MRIs, CT scans, and other images that all the radiologists in America look at each day. Unleashing that kind of AI on the medical world's mountains of patient data could speed up diagnoses and get patients on the path to recovery much sooner.

From forecourt to scrapyard, a new car in the UK lasts an average of 13.9 years, which is why if you got one today, it might very well be the last car you buy. Over the next decade, accelerating autonomous driving technology, including advances in artificial intelligence, sensors, cameras, radar and data analytics, are set to transform not only how we drive (or, indeed, are driven), but the notion of car ownership itself. "Autonomous driving has become the next major battlefield for the car industry," says Luca Mentuccia, automotive global MD at Accenture. The six levels of automation, defined under international standards by the Society of Automotive Engineers, range from "no automation" to "full automation", explains Sven Raeymaekers, of tech investment banker GP Bullhound. "If you look at the most recent predictions, the majority of car manufacturers estimate the first highly to fully automated vehicles [AVs] will hit the market between 2020-2025," he says.

Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. This is the first time an inter-species organ transplant has successfully treated a medical condition. The breakthrough is seen as proof of principle that'spare-part surgery' could one day be used to overcome disease in humans. Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice (stock image pictured) by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a genetics professor at Stanford injected rat embryos with mouse stem cells.

SoftBank Chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son (C), Foxconn Chairman and CEO, Terry Gou (R), and Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma (L) pose with Pepper, the world's first personal robot that can read emotions in 2015. When billionaire Terry Gou acknowledged eyeing a $7 billion U.S. investment at his New Year's press meeting in Taiwan, it solidified his role as the Third Musketeer in East Asia's emerging involvement in Donald Trump's "America First" push. Gou is the founder chairman of Foxconn Technology (aka Hon Hai Precision Industry), the biggest supplier of Apple iPhones and iPads as well as other brand-name devices. Foxconn does most of its assembly in mainland China. So when the 66-year-old Gou said talks had started on a display-screen plant that could create 30,000-50,000 U.S. jobs, his aims fell into place with earlier pronouncements by Asian tech tycoons Masayoshi Son and Jack Ma as they paid visits to Trump Tower after the new president's election.

In billiards, you must call your shot ahead of time. You don't get any points for luck. With that in mind, here are my on-the-record predictions for 2017. Self-driving cars, previously existing only in the world of science fiction, are becoming a reality. Today taxis are driving themselves in Singapore.