Connected devices, Smart City, home automation, e-health, Big Data ... In recent years, the concepts of communicating objects have multiplied. In reality, they are all one facet of the same upheaval - the Internet of Things. Cars can be driven without a driver, TVs are going online, and heating systems are activated automatically to the arrival of the residents. The Internet is making many processes in daily life easier. The Internet of Things, or IoT, which enable devices to communicate with people or machines, is actually working in many places in our daily life already.

The job market for individuals with analytical skills is hot, and it's only getting hotter. A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute puts the situation in perspective, citing a shortfall of nearly 200,000 professionals with strong analytical skills by the year 2018. Businesses are looking to colleges and universities to help fill that gap, asking them to provide their students with the analytical skills they need to fill many of these currently vacant analytical roles. How students can prepare for a career in analytics, and the role universities play in preparing them, is the focus of Dursun Delen's recent article, Mandate for STEM Educators, found in the August issue of INFORMS magazine. Given the shortage, Delen, a professor of business analytics within the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University, says educators haven't had a "mandate this clear since the space race of the 1960s."

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is gradually creeping into our homes and businesses. Amazon Echo is already available in the U.K., with Google Home on the way; Dominos Pizza launched a new chat-bot, supported by Facebook Messenger, for customers to interact with. And then there are the daily stories about how AI will change our lives. The theories around centaur approaches, which combine computing power from machines with the decision making of humans, will likely win through. Computing power is such that it can cut through mountains of information to find insight and decisions.

TalkTalk and other internet providers have stopped providing connections to users after being hit by a huge cyber attack. The troubled internet provider has said that it – along with the Post Office and other internet providers across Europe – were hit by the Mirai worm and had their connections taken offline. That worm is becoming increasingly dangerous. It was blamed for a huge internet outage earlier this year, and works by taking over a variety of unsecured internet devices and then pointing them at weak points in the web's infrastructure. This time it appears to have targeted a certain kind of router that is used both by the Post Office and TalkTalk, and so left customers of both companies unable to get online.

Some people will see abundant possibility; others, the period at the end of humanity's story, as they conflate AI with killer robots and super-intelligent machines that will come to regard us as pets--or worse. A Stanford University-hosted project is under way to look past all that--past the pop-culture takes on AI, the warnings from tech thinkers, and the breathless hype about assistive AI tools in our phones and other devices. The project was set up to take the long view of AI--a very, very long view. The study is an ongoing endowed project, and its goal is for a standing committee of scientists to regularly commission reports that take expansive looks at how AI will touch different aspects of daily life. The first of those reports, the 28,000-word "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," has just been released.

Vinci believes in a future where your headphones are the central hub of your connected world. Over the last two years we've been testing and perfecting a smart, wireless headphone that is controlled by your voice and powered by cloud technology, with no connection needed to your mobile phone. Wire-free and phone-free, Vinci is perfect for joggers, travelers and all music lovers. Vinci allows you to voice control your music when manually choosing songs on your phone is inconvenient. No matter what you're doing - walking, running, or commuting - you can tell Vinci exactly what song or artist you want to listen to, say a specific genre or mood, or let Vinci pick a song for you.

A few months back I was making my way through the latest literature on "real time analytics" and "in stream analytics" and my blood pressure was rising. The cause was the developer-driven hyperbole that claimed that the creation of brand new insights using advanced analytics has become "real time". The issue then as now is the failure to differentiate between time-to-action and time-to-insight. Not infrequently the statements about'fast data' are accompanied by a diagram like this, which to me has a fatal flaw. The flaw, to my way of thinking, is that there are really two completely different tasks here with very different time frames.

When Robert Schapire started studying theoretical machine learning in graduate school three decades ago, the field was so obscure that what is today a major international conference was just a tiny workshop, so small that even graduate students were routinely excluded. But it has become one of the hottest fields in computer science, turning once-obscure academic gatherings like the upcoming Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Barcelona, Spain, into a sold-out affair attended by thousands of computer scientists from top corporations and academic institutions. "It's been really something to see this field develop, and to see things that seemed impossible become possible in my lifetime," said Schapire, a principal researcher in Microsoft's New York City research lab whose machine learning research is widely used in the field. The NIPS conference, which starts Monday, is so popular because machine learning has quickly become an indispensable tool for developing technology that consumers and businesses want, need and love. Machine learning is the basis for technology that can translate speech in real time, help doctors read radiology scans and even recognize emotions on people's faces.

It's 8:00 am on a Tuesday morning. You've awoken, scanned the headlines on your phone, responded to an online post, ordered a holiday sweater for your mom, locked up the house, and are driving to work, listening to some great new music on the radio. You've also used artificial intelligence (AI) more than a dozen times -- to be roused, to call up local weather report, to purchase a gift, to secure your house, to be alerted to an upcoming traffic jam, and even to identify an unfamiliar song. AI is already pervasive in our world, and it's making a huge difference in our everyday lives. But this is not the AI you've seen in sci-fi movies, with nervous scientists clacking on keyboards and attempting to halt machines from destroying the world. Sometimes it's obvious, like when you ask Siri to get you directions to the nearest gas station, or Facebook suggests a friend for you to tag in an image you posted online. Sometimes less so, like when you use your Amazon Echo to make an unusual purchase on your credit card (like that goofy holiday sweater) and don't get a fraud alert from your bank.

Following the viewing of this video, many would be inclined to have a negative opinion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in the autonomous cars and self-driving car industry. Moreover, the media's impact in such a technological advance can play a major role in its evolution and in the education of the stakeholders. Often, they prefer to focus on informational messages, rather than a political term that is commonly referred to as "post-truth" articles, but which could certainly be used for AI. It is indeed this phenomenon that was perceived during the US elections of 2016, with headliner Donald Trump, but also for the Brexit. One question remains around the fact that, in a situation of potential road accidents, the autonomous car will have to make decisions while facing a major moral dilemma: how to determine the chosen victim(s) in an emergency situation?