As an IBM futurist and influencer, I was honored to be part of the World of Watson event (#ibmwow) two months ago in Vegas. Since then, one presentation has been rambling around my soul and my brain. Shannon Vallor, is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, and author of Technology and the Virtues. She gave a brilliant talk on AI, Ethics and the Future of Human Flourishing. She pinpointed why AI raises ethical questions we must answer, and conversations we must have.

SAP's vision is to help the world run better and improve people's lives. As the cloud company powered by SAP HANA, SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and industries run better. SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. SAP applications and services enable our customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. At SAP, we believe in the power of collaboration and empower our employees to perform at their best in an environment that encourages free and open expression of ideas.

"The industry will continue to focus on refining systems, applications, software, security and network infrastructure to meet their needs. Machine learning is the megatrend: its application and influence, particularly on our mobiles, will be improving all parts of our lives in 2017," he said. So begins Deloitte's annual global TMT (Technology, Media, and Telecommunications) report, that since its inception in 2001 has reached an 87% prediction accuracy rate. The report is long but makes for interesting reading. Deloitte Australia forecasts a year that will see further significant breakthroughs in machine learning, indoor GPS navigation, safer travel in motor cars, more cyber mischief and a growing use of biometric security.

But DevOps, which refers to the increased communication and collaboration between development and IT operations, is an ever-changing, sometimes complicated term. While "dev" and "ops" used to be siloed into separate philosophies, practices, tools, and work flows, they're merging into one. Though the basics aren't exactly new, the DevOps world is still trying to figure out how it will evolve and integrate into already established infrastructures. Whether you head a company that relies heavily on DevOps or you're just now dipping your toes into the DevOps pond, there's plenty to learn--because this movement and culture are anything but set in stone. To get a better feel for what's in store for DevOps in 2017, we reached out to the pros. Read on for challenges and changes you may encounter in the coming year. How has DevOps changed the IT landscape in the last few years? There are increasing signs of improved collaboration between Dev and Ops teams to work on a shared goal, which is the continuous delivery of high-quality applications to customers, employees, and partners.

The Trump administration's controversial attempt to declare its recent presidential inauguration as having "the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period," has inadvertently highlighted the fact that counting crowds remains a painstaking and inexact science. But the rise of artificial intelligence could soon spare crowd scientists the task of manually counting heads. An early glimpse of how artificial intelligence (AI) could help count crowds appeared in 2013. University of Central Florida researchers showed how computer software based on machine learning can swiftly provide automated headcount estimates for crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Such AI tools still have room for improvement in terms of achieving accurate headcounts based on images.

Alas, a quick Google search told me that the territory had already been covered. I shouldn't have been surprised. The plot of Plot, in which the fascist sympathizer Charles Lindbergh ascends to the presidency on tailwinds of celebrity and America First populism, speaks with vivid and distressing clarity to the present moment. Philip Roth is not a science-fiction writer, but his novel is part of a long and sturdy tradition within sci-fi: the "alternate history." Take some crucial moment in history and undo it or do it differently.

"The problem is not that nobody has Kinect, but it's that nobody is talking about it anymore." Traverso has a unique perspective on the Kinect marketplace because he's one of the last video-game developers to build an experience specifically for Microsoft's motion-sensing peripheral. Not that the Kinect is officially dead. However, Kinect is clearly not a priority for Microsoft. In 2016, the Xbox One's Kinect 2 received just two games from third-party studios, Fru and Just Dance 2017.

How will people sift and navigate information intelligently in the future, when there's even more data being pushed at them? Information overload is a problem we struggle with now, so the need for better ways to filter and triage digital content is only going to step up as the MBs keep piling up. Researchers in Finland have their eye on this problem and have completed an interesting study that used EEG (electroencephalogram) sensors to monitor the brain signals of people reading the text of Wikipedia articles, combining that with machine learning models trained to interpret the EEG data and identify which concepts readers found interesting. Using this technique the team was able to generate a list of keywords their test readers mentally flagged as informative as they read -- which could then, for example, be used to predict other relevant Wikipedia articles to that person. Or, down the line, help filter a social media feed, or flag content that's of real-time interest to a user of augmented reality, for example.

Lego robot used to reverse engineer the e.dentifier2 smartcard reader (picture courtesy of Chalupar13).

Concerns have recently been widely expressed that artificial intelligence presents a threat to humanity. For instance, Stephen Hawking is quoted in Cellan-Jones1 as saying: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Similar concerns have also been expressed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others. Such concerns have a long history. John von Neumann is quoted by Stanislaw Ulam8 as the first to use the term the singularitya--the point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence.