Last year was huge for advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. But 2017 may well deliver even more. Here are five key things to look forward to. AlphaGo's historic victory against one of the best Go players of all time, Lee Sedol, was a landmark for the field of AI, and especially for the technique known as deep reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning involves having a machine learn to solve a problem not through programming or explicit examples, but through experimentation combined with positive reinforcement.

Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before.

Global technology major Accenture is looking to use the power of combination of the best technologies in the world to build solutions that are unique for their clients. "Accenture is like a glue organisation," says Marc Carrel-Billiard, global managing director -Technology R&D, Accenture. Accenture's technology R&D division is working towards combining different technologies wherein Artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are at the core of it. Their engineers are combining AI with deep learning and machine learning to interpret the large amounts of data being generated from the 20 billion connected devices today. "So, if you combine all the data coming from the sensors with all the computing power, machine learning...we have the best of both worlds. We need to combine them and the combination is a cure, that's exactly what I am talking about - combining things together that makes a big difference," says Carrel-Billiard.

It's been a rough year for erstwhile electric car company Faraday Future. Several members of a senior staff recruited from the likes of Tesla, BMW, and Google, as well as the aerospace and medical device sectors, reportedly jumped ship. The company fell behind in paying the contractor building its factory in Nevada, where state treasurer Dan Schwartz called Faraday Future a Ponzi scheme. Its funding comes from the founder of the Chinese tech giant LeEco, which is building an electric car you could call a rival. A Faraday Future spokesperson says that, as a private company, it does not discuss its finances, and the next stage of the factory is slated for construction soon.

Tomorrow's retail stores want to take a page from their online rivals by embracing advanced technology -- everything from helpful robots to interactive mirrors to shelves embedded with sensors. The goal: Use these real-world store features to lure shoppers back from the internet, and maybe even nudge them to spend more in the process. Amazon's new experimental grocery store in Seattle, opening in early 2017, will let shoppers buy goods without needing to stop at a checkout line. Sensors track items as shoppers put them into baskets or return them to the shelf. The shopper's Amazon account gets automatically charged.

Amid all the sound and fury over Brexit, progressives disorientated by 2016 should remember a vital fact - it is only the firing gun on a decade of much wider disruption. As the UK negotiates its new place in the world, a wave of economic, social and technological change will reshape the country, in often radical ways. It is vital progressives better understand the forces driving these changes and the challenges and opportunities they will create. After all, progressives historically have won when they have a strong set of demands allied to a sense they own the future, and have change in their bones. The IPPR's new report, Future Proof: Britain in the 2020s, sets out the five key trends that will drive change in the 2020s and the major challenges they will create.

Way back in 1969, as a kid, I watched a very interesting movie - "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a science fiction where a super intelligent computer program HAL is in charge of a mission to Jupiter which also carries several astronauts. The program becomes rogue and tries to kill all the astronauts. The hero survives and manages to disable the program. There is a lot more to the plot, but the fight between human and computer is still vivid in my memory. In 1969, such a scenario looked possible. After all 32 years is a lot of time given the rate of our progress.

The company is also emerging as a leader in developing artificial intelligence software in China and is quickly developing real products and applications around this next wave of technology. Among the many examples are Baidu's AI-powered chatbots that help doctors more effectively diagnose diseases, software to help banks prevent fraud more effectively, and learning algorithms that enable self-driving cars to navigate streets more safely. Helping invent the future involves significant near-term investments from Baidu, and the exact payoff for such efforts isn't certain. However, between the long-term growth potential of its lucrative search business and the chance to dominate several important areas of the future of technology, Baidu's overall outlooks remains quite favorable indeed.

SINGAPORE--The acclaimed HBO sci-fi series, "Westworld," may have wrapped up recently, but that's no reason to fret, James Marsden told the Inquirer when we chatted with him early this month. What are your thoughts about artificial intelligence (AI)? There's a quote that says it all: With great power comes great responsibility. That's what we should keep in mind when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. There are smarter people out there who know its potential more than we do.