Though some critics love to knock PCs as dinosaurs, laptops and desktops have gotten sexier, faster and even smarter. For every blue screen of death, there are droves of technological enhancements driving PCs into the era of virtual reality, 4K video and 5G connectivity. Here are the top 10 PC technology and trends to watch next year. An Intel employee demonstrates the company's Project Alloy headset on stage during IDF 2016 in San Francisco on August 16, 2016. VR devices will come in many new shapes and sizes, with some of them acting essentially as PCs that fit on your head.

A few days ago I found out that there had appeared lda2vec (by Chris Moody) – a hybrid algorithm combining best ideas from well-known LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic modeling algorithm and from a bit less well-known tool for language modeling named word2vec. And now I'm going to tell you a tale about lda2vec and my attempts to try it and compare with simple LDA implementation (I used gensim package for this). What is cool about it? It means that LDA is able to create document (and topic) representations that are not so flexible but mostly interpretable to humans. Also, LDA treats a set of documents as a set of documents, whereas word2vec works with a set of documents as with a very long text string.

Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action on December 12, 2016, protesting the illegal and violent arrest of human rights defender and anti-death penalty campaigner Atena Daemi, and calling for her release. The AI wrote, "Anti-death penalty campaigner and human rights defender Atena Daemi was arrested on 26 November 2016 when three Revolutionary Guard officials raided her parents' house and took her away to Tehran's Evin Prison to begin serving her seven-year prison sentence. In a letter leaked from prison on 1 December, Atena Daemi said that she was beaten and pepper sprayed by the officials arresting her after she insisted peacefully that they present an arrest warrant. She has said that her sister was also punched in her chest when she attempted to intervene to stop the officials. She also described how, on the way to prison, the Revolutionary Guard officials blindfolded her and repeatedly threatened her by saying that they would open new cases against her and had'cooked up a plan so that she gets the thought of ever getting released from prison out of her mind.'"

"I never forget a face", "She's got an honest face", "You could see it in his face", and "She looks young for her age" are just a few of the often-used phrases suggesting that faces are important for our interactions with other people and what we think we know about them. But can people really remember faces as well as they think they do, and can we really tell someone's age from their face? Or can artificial intelligence (AI) do it better? And can we really tell if someone is trustworthy just by looking at their face? Research shows that humans exhibit a wide range of facial recognition abilities.

In the beginning, there were mainframe computers and punch cards. Since then, we've seen three transformations. The latest, augmented reality plus artificial intelligence, will change more than the previous three combined. At least, that's what tech evangelist Robert Scoble and author Shel Israel say in their new book: The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything. First was text and MS-DOS.

The game will be the title developed by Nintendo for iPhones, and the first time that Mario has been available on Apple's App Store. It follows the success of Pokemon Go, earlier this year. While Nintendo does own a third of the Pokemon Company, it didn't have much to do with the game and it was developed by a third party. But just like Pokemon Go, the game requires that anyone playing it has a connection to the internet. That's intended as a way of stopping pirates getting around the game's relatively expensive $10 price – not required to download the game, but to unlock it – but has already drawn some complaints. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 32/39 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

Rob May is the CEO and Co-Founder of Talla, a platform for intelligent information delivery in Slack and Hipchat. Previously, Rob was the CEO and Co-Founder of Backupify, (acquired by Datto in 2014). Before that, he held engineering, business development, and management positions at various startups. Rob has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a MBA from the University of Kentucky. He is also a well known angel investor, a venture partner at Pillar, and is the creator and writer of the widely-read and highly-regarded AI newsletter, Technically Sentient. Rob May will be speaking at the Gigaom AI Now in San Francisco, February 15-16th. In anticipation of that, I caught up with him to ask a few questions.

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Fujitsu Ltd. is aiming to reach an agreement on integrating its personal computer business with China's Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's biggest PC maker, by the March 2017 end of fiscal 2016, Fujitsu President Tatsuya Tanaka has said. The integration may take place in fiscal 2017, Tanaka said in an interview. Fujitsu announced the integration plan in October, with its PC business slumping on the back of the shrinking PC market amid the growing popularity of smartphones. Fujitsu's PC brand, FMV, will be kept intact, but it is believed that Lenovo will take the lead in the PC operations after the integration. The two firms are currently in talks on maintaining the Fujitsu group's PC production and development bases, including two plants and jobs at the facilities.

Microsoft Ventures has launched a new fund for investment in AI companies focussed on inclusive growth and positive impact on the society. Talking about the announcement, Nagraj Kashyap, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Ventures, in a blogpost said, "We'll make investments in startups that are responsibly harnessing the promise of AI to empower people and businesses. Companies in this fund will help people and machines work together to increase access to education, teach new skills and create jobs, enhance the capabilities of existing workforces, and improve the treatment of diseases, to name just a few examples." The first investment from this fund is for Montreal-based Element AI – an incubator and platform that helps organisations embrace an AI-first strategy in support of these principles. With this move, Microsoft Ventures has also announced the expansion of its original mandate of supporting cloud companies that help enterprises to navigate the path of digital transformation.