What do you think of when you hear the term'smart city'? Perhaps, you imagine a bright futuristic utopia? Or, maybe, a dark dystopia, packed with cameras, robots, drones and other stuff, watching you 24/7? The reality, however, is different.

It's award season folks, which means that anyone who loves the addictive mix of celebrities, fashion, and the red carpet will be looking forward to getting their daily fix. Who cares who won the award, most of us just need to know who rocked it best in the Oscar de la Renta or Calvin Klein dress and this is where IBM's Watson could step in. Partnering up with Recording Academy, IBM is bringing artificial intelligence to the red carpet. Taking up the role of fashion police, Watson will be showcasing an innate ability to judge the red carpet outfits using an artificial intelligence platform. This will take place at the Grammys on Sunday night, 28th January 2018.

As we move into 2018, the monthly Datasets Publishing Awards has concluded. We're pleased to have recognized many publishers of high-quality, original, and impactful datasets. It was only a little over a year ago that we opened up our public Datasets platform to data enthusiasts all over the world to share their work. We've now reached almost 10,000 public datasets, making choosing winners each month a difficult task! These interviews feature the stories and backgrounds of the November and December winners of the prize.

Last year, the best paper award for ICLR 2017 went to "Re-thinking Generalization" by Chiyuan Zhang et al. The key take away of his teams discovery is that the nature of Deep Learning systems is remarkably very different from other classical machine learning systems. One of the biggest misunderstanding about Deep Learning is that it is just a higher dimensional form of curve fitting and thus solved from the perspective of optimization techniques. This is incorrect notion can be due to the fact that the way Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is taught to many is that it is just a larger form of logistic regression. Alternatively, for the more experienced machine learning expert, everything can be framed from the viewpoint of an optimization problem.

Dinesh Verma is an IBM Fellow, the company's pre-eminent technical distinction granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering. Dinesh has worked in IBM Research for nearly 25 years, holds more than 150 patents, is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and heads a team that is focused on Distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI). The IBM THINK Blog caught up with Dinesh recently to talk about his current work, as well as his career at IBM. The following is an excerpt and is part of our Perspectives series featuring stories by and about IBMers who take the "long view." THINK: Can you tell us a little bit about your role at IBM? Dinesh Verma: I lead the Distributed AI team at IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY.

Tue 23 Jan 2018 12.47 EST Last modified on Tue 23 Jan 2018 14.35 EST The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world's first freelance programmers. Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be "the grandmother of the web". In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser.

John Zysman (Zysman.john@gmail.com) is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, cofounder of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, and convener of the Berkeley Project Work in an Era of Intelligent Tools and Systems. Martin Kenney (mfkenney@ucdavis.edu) is Distinguished Professor of Human and Community Development at the University of California, Davis, and Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; he is also an Affiliated Faculty at Instituto di Management at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy.

Summary: Someone had to say it. In my opinion R is not the best way to learn data science and not the best way to practice it either. More and more large employers agree. Someone had to say it. I know this will be controversial and I welcome your comments but in my opinion R is not the best way to learn data science and not the best way to practice it either.

Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning author of some of the most popular science fiction and fantasy books, died Monday aged 88 at her home in Portland, Oregon. The news of her death was confirmed on her verified Twitter account, according to a brief family statement. "The family of Ursula K. Le Guin is deeply saddened to announce her peaceful death yesterday afternoon," her family said in the statement. Le Guin's son, Theo Downes Le Guin, told the New York Times that the author died after several months of poor health. Guin was born in Berkeley, California, on Oct.21, 1929.

Investment in artificial intelligence grew an estimated 300 percent in 2017, as adoption of AI-powered assistants like Alexa and Siri continued to skyrocket -- and, unsurprisingly, the trend was very much in evidence at this years' CES. As customers have come to expect the "personal assistant" level of service from a diversity of devices, "the bar is [just] being continually raised for consumer expectations in the level of intuitive service and response that is available to them," said Devon MacDonald, Chief Strategy Officer, Mindshare Canada. "People are always looking for things that are faster, easier, safer, and just more frictionless." Following CES, MacDonald talked to GeoMarketing about approaching AI from a'human first' perspective -- and how AR integrations are finally a tangible reality for brands. GeoMarketing: At Mindshare, you've spent a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence.