Sony's PlayStation Store late Tuesday kicked off the holiday season by offering deals on games and movies. The company is calling it the "month-long Holiday sale." Customers can get discounts up to 75 percent on games such as "Borderlands: The Handsome Collection," "EA Sports UFC 2," "Tom Clancy's The Division Gold Edition," and films such as the "Hobbit Trilogy," "Trainwreck" and "Fifty Shades of Grey." PlayStation Plus members will get up to 80 percent discount on the listed products. "100ft Robot Golf (VR)" -- Available for $15.99 (original price $19.99), PlayStation Plus members will get it for $13.99.

That five-inch phone in your pocket, the one you absolutely can't live without, does damn near anything these days. It is the Great Usurper, rendering everything from newspapers to music players to actual human interaction all but obsolete. People embraced smartphones faster than any other gadget in the history of the world, creating a trillion-dollar industry that is expected to reach more than six billion people in the next four years. I hear this question from smartwatch manufacturers and lightbulb companies and headphone makers and so many others in tech. They're all trying to find The Next Big Thing and figure out what the world looks like when smartphones finally go away.

On Election Night, voters in northeastern Ohio's Trumbull and Ashtabula counties made Sean O'Brien--a three-term Democratic state representative--their state senator. They also helped make Donald Trump president. In 2012, 60 percent of Trumbull's largely white, working class electorate voted for Barack Obama. In 2016, they flipped their support to the populist GOP candidate who offered his own promises for change. The partisan shift surprised O'Brien, but he realized it shouldn't have. Days before the election, O'Brien's cousin snapped a photo of his own front yard and sent it to the soon-to-be state senator.

Uninformed Search: This is used when creating an action sequence that doesn't account for any changes along the way. Heuristic Functions: These allow for decisions to be made without accurate or complete information. Adversarial or Moving Agent Search: This is used when there are other entities making decisions that influence one another. Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaches three courses: Artificial Intelligence 1, Artificial Intelligence 2 and Applied Artificial Intelligence.

The CEO of DeNA Co., whose health care information website and others have been under fire following accusations of plagiarism and inaccurate reporting, apologized Wednesday over the scandal, vowing to investigate what went wrong. "We'd like to sincerely apologize to all concerned parties and individuals for causing troubles and worries," Isao Moriyasu, who is also the president of the company, said at a news conference in Tokyo. "Regardless of forms of media, providing accurate information needs to be the first priority when operating a media business," he said. "Our operation focused too much on growing the services." The Tokyo-based firm, which is best known for its mobile video games and professional baseball team, the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, said it will bring in an independent third-party panel to investigate the causes of the poorly handled media services, or so-called curated news sites.

In 2013, Russia's parliament unanimously passed a law forbidding "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations", essentially making it illegal to distribute any material on gay relationships or gay rights via the internet or any other kind of media, or to hold gay pride marches or rallies. The move led to an immediate rise in homophobic hate crime. So far, targets have included Ikea (for the crime of including gay couples in its catalogue), sports events run by LGBT-friendly organisations, and perhaps most famously, the Sochi Olympics. This week, Russian MPs took aim at what might seem like an unlikely target: EA Sports' Fifa 17, the latest entry in an annual series of football games that routinely sells over 20m copies year. What's so gay about Fifa, you might ask?

More and more people are becoming aware that truly smart things are already here and we are definitely seeing a massive trend of artificial intelligence being used across commercial products. This makes people anxious, especially after watching a couple of episodes of Westworld. And knowing there is an AI in your todo list or in Alexa device on your kitchen table doesn't help that feeling at all. Often we hear of the bright minds of our world talking about existential threats and dangers of AI in a vague manner. We talk about implications but we rarely sit down and actually talk through possible simple solutions how to prevent inevitable scenarios.

Etiya's'Serdoo' uses AI to automate customer service management SINGAPORE, 6th December 2016 -- Etiya, the leading independent software vendor providing telco CRM, catalog-driven BSS/OSS, social CRM and big data analytics, announced the launch of a customer service management and application called Serdoo that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate, understand and analyse information from any interaction - such as via text and social media - with a telco's customers. Serdoo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application that is powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The application can be integrated with any digital channel and interprets and deciphers mail, webchats, SMS, and social media postings. The system is making its debut at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore and is the product of 12 months' R&D at Etiya's Silicon Valley location. A number of communication service providers have already trialed Serdoo, with some initial reports showing a reduction in response times by as much as 50%.

Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 concluded its underwater search operations in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said in its latest search update that the vessel "commenced passage to Fremantle to demobilise the Phoenix Remora III Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) before the vessel returns to Shanghai." The agency, which is leading the search for the missing Boeing 777-200, moved from deep tow operations to AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) and ROV operations in October 2016. Dong Hai Jiu 101 vessel has completed 33 dives with the ROV since October 2016. The vessel departed the search area on Dec. 3 and has completed its missions in the search for MH370.

We have been seeing a sudden rise in the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL). It looks like the long "AI winter" is finally over. According to IDC, AI-related hardware, software and services business will jump from $8B this year to $47B by 2020. I have also read comments like, "AI is like the Internet in the mid 1990s and it will be pervasive this time". According to Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, "AI is the new electricity. Just as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same."