This still image taken from drone footage posted online Monday, Jan. 2, 2017 by the Aamaq News Agency, a media arm of the Islamic State group, purports to shows an aerial image of a neighborhood damaged by Turkish airstrikes in the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, in Aleppo province, Syria. Nearly two months into the assault, Turkey has become bogged down in an unexpectedly bloody fight to retake the Islamic State group's last stronghold in northern Syria. It has been forced to pour in troops, take the lead in the battle from its Syrian allies and reach out to Russia for aerial support -- a move that tests its alliance with the United States and the Syrian opposition. This still image taken from drone footage posted online Monday, Jan. 2, 2017 by the Aamaq News Agency, a media arm of the Islamic State group, purports to shows an aerial image of a neighborhood damaged by Turkish airstrikes in the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, in Aleppo province, Syria. Nearly two months into the assault, Turkey has become bogged down in an unexpectedly bloody fight to retake the Islamic State group's last stronghold in northern Syria.

The Nintendo Switch video game console, which will launch next March. On Thursday, Nintendo will likely reveal new details on when it will launch its next video game console. The video game company is hosting an event in Tokyo at 11 p.m. ET, where it is widely expected they will unveil a release date and price for the Nintendo Switch, its home console players detach from a docking station to take on the go. In October, Nintendo first revealed the Switch, which is expected to make its debut this March. Players attach the tablet-like device to a dock to play at home on a television with standard video game controllers.

I had a fun ride attending a very interesting lecture this semester called Programming Paradigms. I learned about the four main paradigms that exist: imperative, object-oriented, functional and logic programming. Now, I'm sure every developer has heard about imperative, OO and functional, but to be honest I had no idea what logic programming was about. I was intrigued, what could this paradigm I had never heard about be, what does it excel in and could it be useful for day-to-day programming problems? The book The Pragmatic Programmer has a tip called "Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio": Different languages solve the same problems in different ways.

Do you think Hollywood has lost touch with American values? Do you think Hollywood has lost touch with American values? The contentious presidential campaign was filled with accusations of elitism and bias by the media -- from the news to entertainment. Many supporters of Donald J. Trump saw his victory as a repudiation of the so-called liberal elite. So as 2017 begins, we ask: Is Hollywood representing all Americans? Are Hollywood values out of sync with American values? It's the start of a conversation we'll have all year with Hollywood's creators, consumers and observers. Most of all, we want to hear from you. Is Hollywood out of touch with your America? Here's what our critics and writers have to say: KENNETH TURAN on potent Hollywood visions that helped elect Trump TV's affluent bubble: MARY McNAMARA on Hollywood's reluctance to deal with class issues Fear of the powerful woman: JUSTIN CHANG on working women and men still behaving badly Realistic or cliche?: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN on ...

It's difficult to describe in a concise list with less than 1,000 words what the definitive direction of artificial intelligence is going to be in a 12-month span. Clearly, I say all of this because I am attempting to write just such a list. If you think something belongs on this list or want to contribute your own ideas based on your own expertise and personal opinion, please feel free to contact us at info@geektime.com. In the meantime, here are the four trends that will dominate artificial intelligence in 2017. We could call this "natural language processing" or NLP, but let's think more broadly about language for a moment.

Google Home and Amazon's Echo are the most famous, but a whole raft of these gadgets is preparing to flood the market. One of the most advanced will likely come from Baidu, the Chinese tech giant that, like Google, began as a search engine and now has its tendrils in all sorts of digital and physical spaces. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief AI scientist, calls these devices "conversational computers," and he's a key reason any of them have learned to talk in the first place. A former AI researcher at Stanford, Ng is best known for spearheading the Google Brain initiative, an ambitious artificial-intelligence project that helped advance Silicon Valley's understanding of deep-learning techniques. Instead of being programmed to respond to specific actions, a deep learning system is fed massive amounts of data from which it is able to discern patterns over time, loosely mimicking how the human mind absorbs information. Ng's system at Google famously figured out what a cat looks like after scanning millions of online images.

By Kim Han-joo SEOUL, Jan. 11 (Yonhap) -- Fierce competition is expected among technology companies from both home and abroad in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) language translations that industry officials say will soon reach human-level accuracy. Google Inc. is the leading provider of an AI-based translation platform by becoming the first to introduce its Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system last year that significantly improves translation quality and reduces errors. The new system is based on a deep learning framework that learns from millions of examples from over 100 different languages, the U.S. tech giant said. Unlike previous machine translation that was adopted 10 years ago, the new system considers an entire sentence as one unit. Previous systems independently translated words and phrases within a sentence.

Trucks that can drive themselves along delivery routes. Apps that can translate sentences with near human-like accuracy. These are just a few of the milestones artificial intelligence, or AI, has enabled in the past year -- and experts say it will only keep changing our lives at a breakneck pace. But some of the world's greatest technological minds, like Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates to Tesla and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have expressed misgivings about AI. Musk, who backs an AI research group aimed at keeping the technology open and beneficial to the public, has previously said the technology could be our "biggest existential threat."

Earlier in this series, we discussed IBM's (IBM) aims to widen the realms of its Strategic Imperatives segment by focusing on marketing, CRM (customer relationship management), and customer analytics. It has increased its focus on AI (artificial intelligence), a consumer-driven technology that enables us to gauge customer sentiment. AI's natural language capabilities make it possible for human beings and computers to chat and interact in everyday language. ML (machine learning) enables the analysis of huge amounts of real world data to find trends and patterns and make predictions based on those patterns. Therefore, AI and ML can help companies ascertain whether a customer is likely to opt for a particular offering.

IoT is rapidly changing the way enterprises are using data to improve business decision-making. In order to derive business value, organizations must unlock insights from the data gathered and then act on these. In their session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, and Peter Shashkin, Head of Development Department at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how one organization leveraged IoT, cloud technology and data analysis to improve customer experiences and efficiencies. They shared the lessons learned, why they believe IoT works better with the cloud, and the four steps organizations should follow to ensure they are able to achieve big business intelligence with IoT. Speaker Bios Peter Shashkin is Head of Development Department at EastBanc Technologies.