Sophia the robot is a celebrity in its own right. It has been on chat shows, given speeches and was even made a citizen of the UAE. Before I "met" Sophia, I was given a sheet of guidelines by the company behind it, Hanson Robotics. Don't talk to the robot about sex, religion or politics, it said. Ask direct questions and remember it is not a fortune teller - it can't tell you whether you'll be rich or find love.

What makes a person a human being? These are questions this year's Ars Electronica Festival--theme: Artificial Intelligence – The Other I--aims to shed light on. The exhibition treating this topic, POINT ZERO, is a search for the essence of human, machine and data in the depths of POSTCITY Linz. In a prior interview, Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica, gave us some fascinating food for thought about the festival theme. Here, he talks about artists' takes on artificial intelligence, the POINT ZERO theme exhibition and his personal highlights.

Recently I met with Rene Buest, director of Technology Research at Arago, during Cloud Expo in Frankfurt. Based on his experience, I wanted to find out if artificial intelligence (AI) is eating the data infrastructure. In the last few months, I've read a few articles about the impact of AI on the software world, with provocative titles like AI Is Eating Software. As an employee of an infrastructure and data management company, I wanted to understand what AI means for data infrastructure and what kind of impact this exciting technology will have on the future of IT. I asked Rene four questions to get his take on the subject.

The robot duck is modeled after the mascot for the insurance company Aflac, which paid for its development and is branding the duck with its name. Aflac spokesman Jon Sullivan said the ducks -- plush on the outside with sophisticated robotics hidden beneath a washable cover -- will be given free to children diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. The duck is expected to be featured Monday at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas. Sullivan said the company intends to continue covering costs of the duck for kids, with no plans for hospitals or insurers to pay for them -- unlike Jerry the Bear, which can be purchased directly online.

Jefferson Graham previews the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new smart home products using technology from Google, Amazon and Apple will be unveiled. LAS VEGAS -- The trade show of the Consumer Electronics Show will open Tuesday, but we've got a sneak peek on some of the coolest technology set to debut at the world's biggest consumer trade show. Each year, the Consumer Technology Association, which stages the CES, selects 20 products for the CES Innovation Awards, "honoring outstanding design and engineering," in consumer tech products. And we've got the list. The categories are varied, everything from 3D printing, computer accessories, home appliances, home speakers, robots and cameras.

This video course will demonstrate the steps for analyzing unstructured data with the R/R Studio software. The approaches will be illustrated using practical applications for business, healthcare, and retail data, among others. At the end the video course you will have mastered obtaining and visualizing data with R. You will also be confident with data cleaning, preparation, and sentiment analysis with R. Dr. Bharatendra Rai is a professor of Business Statistics and Operations Management in the Charlton College of Business at UMass Dartmouth. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit.

We are at the dawn of the AI-first age of computing, says Google's Simon Balfe. Simon Balfe is agency development manager at Google Marketing Solutions in Dublin. We caught up with him at the recent Virgin Media Digital Evolution conference at the Titanic Belfast centre. "Mobile has become more important based on searches and we can now see, based on the data that we have, that machine learning is the next big shift, and we are trying to get that message across to people and help them along," he said.

Dr. Pradeep Dubey is an Intel Fellow and Director of Parallel Computing Lab (PCL), part of Intel Labs. Traditionally, there has been a division of labor between computers and humans where all forms of number crunching and bit manipulation are left to computers, whereas intelligent decision-making is left to us humans. We are now at the cusp of a major transformation that can disrupt this balance. This disruption is triggered by an unprecedented convergence of massive compute with massive data, and some recent algorithmic advances. This confluence has the potential to spur a virtuous cycle of compute.

This is a chatbot I created should is not based on any sort of real artificial intelligence. The responses should be completely random if the bot does not understand exactly what you say. You can interact with my bot at http://pandorabots.com - Chris AI Version 5 is in the Clubhouse.

Does Cortana have a future in the workplace? We want to hear your thoughts. Late last month, Amazon unveiled "Alexa for Business" – the company's latest foray into digital assistant space. Targeting the workplace, the new version of Alexa is tailored for businesses looking to automate the office, with commands for starting conference calls, handling appointments and hooking directly into other enterprise services. This announcement follows an earlier partnership between Amazon and Microsoft, where plans were outlined to merge the company's two rival assistants in select scenarios, covering a wider range of skills.