President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday showed no inclination toward sanctioning Russia, despite President Barack Obama's push for the country to take steps against Russia over its alleged interference in the election that saw Trump emerge victorious. "I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on," Trump told reporters at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. "We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure we have the kind of security that we need," he added.

Asked whether the U.S. should sanction Russia over computer hacking on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump cast doubt on the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies and said, "We ought to get on with our lives." But it was his next lines that had an oddly familiar ring to them: "I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly," Trump told reporters in Florida, according to multiple media reports. "The whole age of [the] computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on." It isn't the first time a U.S. leader has appeared uncomfortable with technology. When George W. Bush discussed "the Internets" in a 2000 presidential debate against democratic opponent Al Gore, it quickly became a "Bushism" -- a neologism for folksy colloquialisms attributed to the then President. And Bush was still at it in 2006, as evidenced by this CNBC interview in which he famously talked about using "the Google" to view his ranch.

As BMW continues to weld a position for itself in the next generation of connected and autonomous car technology, it's signed up for one more partnership that focuses on the data side of the equation. Today, IBM announced that it would be working with BMW on R&D where Watson sensors and computing will be integrated into BMW cars to pick up car data and help with new systems aimed at vehicles running more efficiently and with more personalisation for specific drivers and passengers. As part of the deal between IBM and BMW, IBM will be hacking four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars at its Munich Watson IoT HQ, turning them into prototype solutions that will run on IBM's Bluemix cloud platform. To be clear, although there are a lot of efforts underway right now in the industry to built autonomous (self-driving) cars, this is not exactly about that. Rather it's more about figuring out the best way of building systems in vehicles to help make them work better, whether or not they are being driven by humans.

The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) have been a discussion point ever since the term was coined back in the 1950s, and it continues to generate both wonder and unease in equal measure. Stories about new applications of AI appear every day. The pace of change is so rapid that we do not have time to adjust to the new normal before the next advancement has been made and reported in the news, which contributes to the feelings of anxiety that this subject can generate. Many news stories focus on the fear of job automation, with some predicting that up to half of jobs will be computerized within the next 20 years. The fear of mechanization has existed since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but new industries and jobs have always previously been created that balance out the ones being disrupted.

Many technology commentators got all excited a few months ago when Microsoft launched how-old.net, a website where users could upload a photo and the site would guess the age of the person in the picture. The service was a great way to showcase the opportunity that applying artificial intelligence to a problem set introduces. Insilico hopes to deliver a similar sort of an offering, but with a far more important purpose. Insilico Medicine is an organization focused on aging research. Headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, it has R&D resources in Belgium, Poland, Russia and China employing 39 scientists worldwide.

Most people don't buy a jar of relish every week. But when they decide to buy one from Ocado--the world's largest online-only grocery retailer--they don't have to scrabble at the back of the store. Instead, they call on robots and artificial intelligence to have it delivered to their door. Ocado claims that its 350,000-square-foot warehouse in Dorden, near the U.K.'s second city of Birmingham, is more heavily automated than Amazon's warehouse facilities. The company's task is certainly more challenging in many respects: most of the 48,000 lines of goods that it sells are perishable, and many must be chilled or frozen.

The Nintendo Switch is not releasing until March next year, but as early as now many gamers and fans are anticipating the titles that will be supported by the upcoming console. This week, new information has surfaced claiming that Ubisoft is planning to release a new "Assassin's Creed" game for the Switch. Without hesitation, Dale revealed via Twitter that publisher Ubisoft intends to release the game for the Switch the same day that the game is bound to hit other consoles (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), as first reported by My Nintendo News. It wouldn't be surprising if Dale's statement turns out to be true. After all, Ubisoft was one of the first third-party companies to laud Nintendo's home and handheld console hybrid.

You can expand the analytical potential of a BI tool by embedding, or providing a seamless interface to advanced analytics engines such as R. It is not a new idea: some BI vendors such as Tableau have already tried to boost the analytical capabilities of their BI tools through integration with R, but the way Tableau has done it is far from perfect because they connect to R through calculated fields. The R calculations have to be wrapped into some Tableau functions that are designed to support the integration and which, in turn, pass values to R via the Rserve package. To put it simply, Tableau Desktop relies on having an extra software layer between it and R. This article demonstrates a contrasting approach. It shows how to develop a Power BI Dashboard that uses an R machine-learning script as its data source. Despite of the simplicity of the example and of the data sources, it shows most of the typical phases of the BI dashboard development.

This year, many of us let a stranger into our homes and ended up loving it. I am, of course, talking about voice-activated artificial-intelligence assistants. The success of Amazon's Alexa, the launch of Google's Home, and Mark Zuckerbrg's public quest to build his own digital butler all demonstrate that conversational interfaces, which we predicted would be a breakthrough technology in 2016, are here to stay. Amazon's Echo smart speaker, which is a conduit for the company's Alexa AI assistant, was officially available to all in the U.S. from 2015. But this year it also went on sale in the U.K. and Germany, and estimates suggest that it sold as many as two million units in the first nine months of 2016.

Ford has unveiled a sleeker design for its self-driving Fusion. The new model is still equipped with the current autonomous vehicle platform, but now has more computing power that will help the firm unleash them on the road by 2021. Also, unlike other autonomous models, the American car maker removed the bundle of sensors from the roof, giving this prototype a more traditional automobile look. Ford has unveiled a sleeker design of it self-driving car Fusion. It process data transmitted from an array of sensors that help the car'see' its surroundings.