That company, the'secretive' Magic Leap has yet to showcase any of the Mixed Reality platform it is working on, but in the meantime Microsoft has opened up it's MR platform for developers and we expect to see some fruit in 2017. Self teaching Robots have been one of the breakthroughs of 2016 as we have seen more examples of bot to bot communication in which one machine shares its learning with another, and deep learning based networks which robots can tap into and teach themselves.

And it was a particularly painful year for the likes of Samsung. It wasn't all bad, of course, but Chris Velazco explains that when your biggest headlines of 2016 are about flaming phones, you can't wait to flip the calendar to 2017. Similarly, Jess Conditt recounted Yahoo's series of catastrophes that was the past twelve months. An attack compromising 500 million accounts was only the company's second-biggest hack revealed this year. Nathan Ingraham was disappointed by Apple.

Historically, more than half of the sales through eBay Inc.'s online auction site are made overseas. There was a problem, though: Users on the site saw only listings posted in their preferred language. People could change their settings and browse the site in different languages, one at a time. But they had little visibility into products and goods listed in languages other than the selected one. With different sellers posting the same items in a variety of languages, this meant that individual users were only seeing a segment of all the listings for a given product.

And thanks to the newly released "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", public sentiment towards droids is off the charts. It's unlikely the CNET team will stumble across anything as endearing new Star Wars droid K-2SO as it scours the halls in Las Vegas. Robots have primarily been used as marketing gimmicks or demonstration props at previous shows. That, says IHS analyst Dinesh Kithany, is set to change. "What we will see is more from the application point of view," Kithany said.

The following is the text of a talk I gave in San Francisco on December 1st, 2016. The audience was readers of my newsletter, Exponential View. You can sign up here. This is a long (7,500 word) transcript of the talk. You can scan it to see the slides and accompanying exhibits if that is easier. Or even read it in more than one sitting…. Exponential View has a purpose. In between all the emojis and all the spelling mistakes, this is what it's about: This is me on my first day at school back when I was in Zambia in sub-Saharan Africa. On the right is my friend Rehan, who I reconnected recently through Facebook. He is now known as Dr. Freeze and he does non-invasive body sculpting in Orange County. So I can get you a good rate. But I think it's important, this starting point is important. We often are inspired from where we come from and what the hell was I doing in Zambia? My dad was trained as economist and accountant, well he is retired now, but then he was an economist and was down in Zambia building the kind of institutions that we take for granted in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. to make the country function. Zambia had just got independence from the U.K. It needed a deeper civil service, it was having to build its legal system, create its system of distribution and so on. So I got an early exposure to the importance of economic institutions for making societies wealthier and making them work. While I was down in Zambia, which is a land-locked country and doesn't have great access to the sea and this is the 1970s, so we didn't have a vast range of toys.

Life has been busy for the stars of "Sherlock" since the series premiered in 2010, with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss applying new London style and contemporary quirks to Arthur Conan Doyle's famous consulting detective. Its fourth season -- there have been breaks -- begins Sunday on PBS' "Masterpiece: Mystery!" Martin Freeman, the series' Dr. John Watson, has gone from a guy you might have seen on the British version of "The Office" or in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to playing Bilbo Baggins in three "Hobbit" movies and the hapless Lester Nygaard in the first season of FX's "Fargo," and hosting "Saturday Night Live." Benedict Cumberbatch, its Sherlock (also in the "Hobbit" movies, as the voice of Smaug) has, among other things, played Khan in "Star Trek Into Darkness," the title role in "Doctor Strange," codebreaker Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game" and Richard III in BBC's "The Hollow Crown" Shakespeare cycle; sung "Comfortably Numb" with Pink Floyd's David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall; and has become something of an international, official hot guy. Conan Doyle wrote 60 Holmes stories, but the world has deemed that insufficient, and many other hands have filled out the tale. Holmes is a useful mix of specific qualities and scant details -- an attitude, occupation and method as much as a full-fleshed, full-fledged character, and so familiar that even some characters not called Sherlock Holmes, like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House on "House," are recognizably him.

You're whizzing along a dark, outback highway when the symptoms start. Your mouth is so dry it's getting hard to swallow or talk, your grip on the steering wheel is weakening and that centre white line just turned into two. You pull in at a small town hospital where the tired junior doctor tells you it's probably a virus, and then hands your case over to night staff. She retakes your history wearing Google Glass, and the web-enabled headgear uses voice recognition to input your symptoms into a massive data base. It's botulism; very rare, often fatal, and you're just in time to get the antitoxin.

Internet of Things (IoT) has brought everything connected through internet. Increase application of smart devices are enabling us to collect big data on a regular basis. The data gathered are becoming more complex and uncertain and therefore artificial intelligence (AI) came into picture. AI can efficiently deal with the difficulties created by big data. Artificial Intelligence is basically the simulation of logical human thinking using computer technology.

Artificial Intelligence, depending on who you speak to, will either be our greatest achievement or our last great achievement as a species. It will either provide complete freedom from laborious tasks or further enslave or exterminate us. AI will either provide a world free of warfare or become the world's greatest war machine turning on its masters. The potential liberation and enhancement to mankind cannot be underestimated, but fears are well founded. Given the latter, let's take a quick look at the concerns about AI.

This is a follow up to an article Per wrote last year, Machine Learning in a Week, on how he kickstarted his way into machine learning (ml) by devoting five days to the subject. Follow him on Medium and check out his archive. My interest in ml stems back to 2014 when I started reading articles about it on Hacker News. I simply found the idea of teaching machines stuff by looking at data appealing. At the time I wasn't even a professional developer, but a hobby coder who'd done a couple of small projects. So I began watching the first few chapters of Udacity's Supervised Learning course, while also reading all articles I came across on the subject.