LOS ANGELES -- What's worse, a phone that explodes in your face or a drone that falls from the skies? It's a question worth pondering as we embark on our annual list of the top tech turkeys of the year. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The Samsung Note 7 received rave reviews for wireless charging, water resistant design and the ability to unlock the phone with your iris. But weeks after the first shipments, consumers started reporting phones that were erupting in flames, causing damage to houses and cars. Samsung announced a re-call and a massive replacement-- and then the new phones started blowing up, too.

Is Tesla working on augmented reality for drivers? Andrew Kim worked on Microsoft's augmented reality Hololens project He has helped create a headset that lets you interact with holograms Potential applications include a projected display on the car's windscreen May make steering wheel minimalist ahead of it disappearing altogether Andrew Kim worked on Microsoft's augmented reality Hololens project Potential applications include a projected display on the car's windscreen Electric car maker Tesla may be looking to add augmented reality (AR) to the mix, after recruiting a senior designer who worked on Microsoft's Hololens headset What a self-driving Tesla'sees' on the road: Impressive... Watch the heart-stopping moment a Tesla's'instant... Elon Musk reveals Tesla's'ludicrous mode' is about to get... Google teaches its AI to DREAM: Firm hopes technique used by... What a self-driving Tesla'sees' on the road: Impressive... Watch the heart-stopping moment a Tesla's'instant... Elon Musk reveals Tesla's'ludicrous mode' is about to get... Google teaches its AI to DREAM: Firm hopes technique used by... By merging AR with Tesla's on board computers, drivers could potentially see the car's displays and even hazard information projected onto the windscreen. IS TESLA EXPLORING AUGMENTED REALITY? Andrew Kim was a senior designer on Microsoft's Hololens.

Neil Prakash, an Australian recruiter for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS), was arrested somewhere in the Middle East after surviving drone attacks by the FBI, the New York Times reported Thursday. The 25-year-old, who was linked to militant plots in Australia and had appeared in several ISIS propaganda videos, was believed killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in April. According to the Times, which cited an unnamed senior American military official, Prakash was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year but survived. Another senior U.S. military official reportedly said the former Melbourne resident was arrested some time in the last few weeks by an unidentified Middle Eastern government. Prakash, who converted to Islam from Buddhism and took the name Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, left Australia in 2013 and has been recruiting fighters for ISIS since then.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is booming, with nearly every major player in the enterprise space vying for a foothold. IBM, Amazon, GE, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, SAP, HPE, Verizon--you name it, anybody and everybody, even folks who used to sell hardware--are actively working on and/or want to stake a claim in a piece of the AI pie. What encompasses the AI market? Machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), voice recognition and image processing, application and geography are what we're looking at, with mobile devices and cloud being the enablers. And just what will the AI market be?

Banking and financial-services providers have more data than any other industry at their disposal – it's time to make the most of this, for the benefit of customers themselves. Digital transformation is changing the way banks talk to customers, but forward-looking financial institutions in the region are looking at how they can deploy artificial intelligence and automation to transform the customer experience, says Danny Drew, Avaya's Managing Director for South Africa. When was the last time you actually visited your bank branch? For most people, the answer is likely to be somewhere in between the last time you had to do a major financial transaction, such as applying for a loan or a mortgage, and… you just can't remember. The way consumers interact with banks has fundamentally changed over the past few years as trends like mobile and online banking have become increasingly important.

The research could add to China's vast security apparatus, which already includes AI-based "predictive policing". Earlier this year, Beijing hired the China Electronics Technology Group, the country's largest defence contractor, to create an AI that can analyse the behaviour of people in CCTV footage for signs that they're about to commit an act of terror. Once complete, the system will be used to predict "security events" so that police or the military can be deployed in advance. Digital rights experts warned that using AI in this way could be dangerous and that "reaching generalised conclusions from such small data poses huge problems for innocent people". Dr Richard Tynan, technologist at Privacy International, said: "This is no different than Craniometry from the 1800s, which has been debunked. In fact, the problem runs much deeper because it can be impossible to know why a machine has made a certain decision about you. "It demonstrates the arbitrary and absurd correlations that algorithms, AI, and machine learning can find in tiny datasets.

In an industry known for its love of buzzwords and hype, artificial intelligence (AI) has become marketing's new'big data'. But where big data ultimately led to new layers of complexity, AI promises the opposite. Big data forced marketers to become data scientists (or hire them, if they could be found), but AI holds out the hope that marketers may get to go back to doing what they signed up for the in the first place. Recent months have seen technology providers such as Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft bring new AI-based technologies to market, promising to derive insights and improve conversions by mimicking the processes of the human brain in software. Salesforce, for example, is rolling out its Einstein AI technology to provide functions such as product recommendations within the Commerce Cloud, email content recommendations within its Marketing Cloud, and predictive forecasting tools for sales managers with its Sales Cloud.

When you think about how far some sectors of consumer electronics has come in the past decade -- think about the smartphones, computers, and gaming consoles we used in 2006 vs what's available today -- it becomes apparent that personal audio technology has remained oddly stagnant. Sure, companies have cut the cord and gone digital, but even that movement is only slowly taking hold (just check how many people were upset at the iPhone 7′s removal of a 50-plus-year-old analog port). It is that realization -- that innovations in headphones has been relatively muted compared to other areas of tech -- that inspired 36-year-old Max Wu to co-found Vinci, a two-year-old startup headquartered in Beijing that will soon release the world's most ambitious headphones. You may think the latter claim is marketing hyperbole -- that is until you hear what the Vinci does, will soon do, and working on doing in the near future. "I envisioned the Vinci as a robot that sits on your head," says Wu. Okay, that sounds weird (and painful).

The healthcare sector has always embraced technology. Since the advent of the computer, technologists and healthcare professionals have been working together to exploit technological breakthroughs so that they might improve patient outcomes while also minimising costs and delivering high standards of care to a greater number of patients. When a technology becomes reliable, cost-effective and scalable, it is embraced and generally thrives. We saw this in the '70s with the adoption of mainframe computers, in the '80s with the widespread adoption of personal computers and local networking, in the '90s with internet-based systems and more recently with the adoption of mobile technologies. It appears now we are on the cusp of the next technological revolution within healthcare, combining the vast amounts of data available, cloud computing services and machine learning techniques in order to create artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions that can provide expert insight and analysis on a mass scale, at a relatively low cost.

In the not-too-distant future, our fields could be tilled, sown, tended and harvested entirely by fleets of co-operating autonomous machines by land and air. Driverless tractors that can follow pre-programmed routes are already being deployed at large farms around the world. Drones are buzzing over fields assessing crop health and soil conditions. Ground sensors are monitoring the amount of water and nutrients in the soil, triggering irrigation and fertiliser applications. And in Japan, the world's first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year.