As organisations face into a new year of digital transformation, Dell has announced its predictions for how exciting new advances will aid the progress of Irish business and society at large. Aisling Keegan, vice-president and commercial general manager of Dell EMC Ireland, said: "Emerging technologies have the potential to solve some of the intractable problems faced by humanity, and offer the opportunity to increase productivity for business. "To help organisations throughout Ireland prepare for the digital transformation happening around, we've compiled our predications to explore what innovations will come to the fore in 2018." "From the explosion in the number of connected devices, the widespread adoption of AI, the journey towards the'mega cloud' and the enhancement of cybersecurity technologies, 2018 will be a year of epic transformation. Organisations must act on this change or be left behind." So, what can we expect from the new year? Over the next few years, AI will change the way teams spend their time acting on data, not just in terms of curating it. Data-driven'thinking tasks' will be carried out for companies, significantly reducing the time they spend scoping, debating, scenario planning and testing every new innovation. Expect to see a reduction in bottlenecks. IoT-enhanced cities, organisations, homes and vehicles will become even more prevalent in 2018, according to Dell's outlook. "With the cost of processing power decreasing and a connected node approaching $0, soon we'll have 100bn connected devices and, after that, a trillion.

One of the biggest challenges for venture capital companies is finding interesting investment targets before anyone else. It is often a laborious, travel-intensive job. But machine learning and predictive analytics are starting to transform how an investor puts a portfolio together. "My job used to be about getting on a plane once a week and going to a different European city to try to find people who were doing interesting things," says Roberto Bonanzinga, co-founder of InReach Ventures and previously a partner at Balderton Capital, a UK-based VC firm which invests primarily in early-stage European technology companies. It was inefficient, he says.

Tricking Google's computer vision AI into seeing a dog as a pair of human skiers may seem mostly harmless. But the possibilities become more unnerving when considering how hackers could trick a self-driving car's AI into seeing a plastic bag instead of a child up ahead. Or making future surveillance systems overlook a gun because they see it as a toy doll. An independent AI research group run by MIT students has demonstrated a new way to fool the computer vision algorithms that enable AI systems to see the world--an approach that could prove up to 1000 times as fast as other existing ways of hacking "black box" systems whose inner workings remain hidden to outsiders. That idea of a black box perfectly describes the neural networks behind the deep learning algorithms enabling computer vision services for Google, Facebook, and other companies.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. PAL Robotics' StockBot and I share the same holiday party strategy: Find a corner to stand in, and slowly rotate. At the Autonomous Systems Lab, the Robotic Systems Lab, and the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, sometimes robots do everything to fulfill a child's dream, even if that dream is of some freaky unicorn monster thing.

This is Bernhard Schölkopf's Introduction to Machine Learning, given at the Machine Learning Summer School 2017, held at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, in Tübingen, Germany, from 19-30 June 2017. Slides for this talk, in pdf format, as well as an overview and links to other talks held during the Summer School, can be found at http://mlss.tuebingen.mpg.de/2017

Mayor of London's TechInvest Programme is an exclusive event series supported by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in partnership with UK Business Angels Association. This four-year London-based series will showcase the Capital as a global hub for tech innovation by inviting London's tech entrepreneurs to pitch their ground-breaking tech businesses to industry leading investors – increasing their potential to access investment to support their journey to high growth and global success. Applications are open for the first of the Mayor of London's TechInvest events for 2017-18 which will take place on January 18, 2018 At each event, the top 10 entrepreneurs selected from a panel of industry experts, will be given the opportunity to present their innovative technologies to a group of over 100 leading investors, drawn from the Angel and VC community. The selected businesses will also get one to one support and guidance with pitching to and engaging with investors. The first in the TechInvest event series will focus on Artificial Intelligence.

A robot called Bina48 has successfully taken a course in the philosophy of love at Notre Dame de Namur University, in California. According to course instructor William Barry, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Mixed Reality Immersive Learning and Research Lab at NDNU, Bina48 is the world's first socially advanced robot to complete a college course, a feat he described as "remarkable." The robot took part in class discussions, gave a presentation with a student partner and participated in a debate with students from another institution. The robot is modeled mentally and physically after a woman called Bina Aspen, who is married to technology entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt. Bina48 has been the subject of extensive media coverage since its creation, and is sometimes referred to as the "world's most sentient robot."

In March 2017, OpenAI released a blog post on evolution strategies, an optimisation technique that has been around for several decades. The novelty of their paper was that they managed to apply the technique to deep neural networks in the context of reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Before this, the optimisation of deep learning RL models (with typically millions of parameters) was typically achieved with backpropagation. Using evolution strategies for deep neural network (DNN) optimisation seemingly unlocked an exciting new toolbox for deep learning researchers to play with. This week, Uber AI Research released a set of five papers which are all focussed on'neuroevolution'.

Will robots one day destroy us? For developments in artificial intelligence (AI) -- machines programmed to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence -- are poised to reshape our workplace and leisure time dramatically. This year, a leading Oxford academic, Professor Michael Wooldridge, warned MPs that AI could go'rogue', that machines might become so complex that the engineers who create them will no longer understand them or be able to predict how they function. AlphaZero taught itself chess in just four hours and thrashed a grandmaster using moves never seen before in the game's 1,500 year history Yes, it's a concern, but a'historic' new development makes unpredictable decisions by AI machines the least of our worries. And it all started with a game of chess. AlphaZero, an AI computer program, this month proved itself to be the world's greatest ever chess champion, thrashing a previous title-holder, another AI system called Stockfish 8, in a 100-game marathon.

This week, ServiceNow released the results of a new report, revealing that a majority of organisations have introduced advanced automation in their workplace – with the full effects being felt next year. A third of companies said that by 2018 they will need greater automation to handle the volume of tasks being generated. By 2020, eight out of 10 UK companies will hit that breaking point which is being contributed to by the overload created by mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Intelligent automation could address the issue of the breaking point and increase productivity. This includes artificial intelligence or machine learning to streamline decision making to improve the speed and accuracy of business processes.