Virtual reality and robotics will become widely adopted in education in the next two to three years, while wearable devices are expected to become mainstream in the education space over the next four to five years, according to a recent report published by the New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking. The "NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016 K–12 Edition" examined emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning and creative inquiry in schools. The report, released at the end of 2016, looked at tech trends in the short term (one year or less), mid-term (two to three years) and long term (four to five years. The VR market in general is certainly heating up. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that virtual and augmented reality entertainment revenue will reach $3.2 billion by 2025, while the education sector will attract 15 million users, the report said.

In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was literate. Today, human life expectancy is over 70 years, less that 10% of the global population lives in extreme poverty, and over 80% of people are literate. These improvements are due mainly to advances in technology, beginning in the industrial age and continuing today in the information age. There are many exciting new technologies that will continue to transform the world and improve human welfare. Here are eleven of them.

In the present exam-driven world of education, whenever a new technology emerges people want to know how it can be used to make kids get better marks, how it can speed up teaching and cut the cost of learning, and could it be used to replace teachers altogether? These are all the wrong questions. Young people are not widgets and learning is not an industrial process. Applying business productivity and efficiency models misses the real opportunity. Technology tends to come around in cycles and machine learning is not a new technology to education.

The contentious presidential campaign was filled with accusations of elitism and bias by the media -- from the news to entertainment. Many supporters of Donald J. Trump saw his victory as a repudiation of the so-called liberal elite. So as 2017 begins, we ask: Is Hollywood representing all Americans? Are Hollywood values out of sync with American values? It's the start of a conversation we'll have all year with Hollywood's creators, consumers and observers. Most of all, we want to hear from you . Is Hollywood out of touch with your America? Here's what our critics and writers have to say: KENNETH TURAN on potent Hollywood visions that helped elect Trump TV's affluent bubble: MARY McNAMARA on Hollywood's reluctance to deal with class issues Fear of the powerful woman: JUSTIN CHANG on working women and men still behaving badly Realistic or cliche?: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN on film's working class men and women Building distrust: LORRAINE ALI on destructive TV portrayals of Muslims and how TV ...

Machine Learning can sound very complicated, but anyone with a will to learn can successfully apply it, if they approach it from first principles. This course, Classification Using Tree Based Models, covers a specific class of Machine Learning problems - classification problems and how to solve these problems using Tree based models. First, you'll learn about building and visualizing decision trees as well as recognizing the serious problem of overfitting and its causes. Next, you'll learn about using ensemble learning to overcome overfitting. Finally, you'll explore 2 specific ensemble learning techniques - Random Forests and Gradient boosted trees By the end of this course, you'll be able to recognize opportunities where you can use Tree based models to solve classification problems and measure how well your solution is doing.

As each year wraps up experts pull their crystal balls from their drawers and start peering into it for a glimpse of what's to come in the next one. At BigML, We have been following such clairvoyance carefully this past holiday season to compare and contrast with our own take on what 2017 will have in store, which can come across as quite unorthodox to some experts out there. For the TL;DR crowd, our crystal ball is showing us a cloudy (no pun intended) 2017 Machine Learning market forecast with some sunshine behind the clouds for good measure. To put it more directly, enterprises need to look beyond the AI hype for practical ways to incorporate Machine Learning into their operations. This starts with the right choice of internal platform that will help them build on smaller, low hanging fruit type projects that leverage their proprietary datasets.

Supercomputers, the internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are coming into full bloom. The future is evolving quickly away from GUI and touch-based methods to AI and voice control. The implications for our personal computing experience are immense, and it all starts with the fundamentals of the education of our children. It may start like this, but Star Trek's Lt. Commander Data is the ultimate goal. One of my strong interests is computer-aided learning.

Do you understand your fiduciary duties? In his prescient 1942 short story, "Runaround," Isaac Azimov proposed a simple set of laws for robots: Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin has come up with a few more laws for the age of Big Data, when gadgets like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa pose as kindly robot helpers but also collect terabytes of data about your Internet browsing habits, driving patterns and even conversations inside your home. "Think about the basic structure of the problem: We're going to bring into our houses, and use as agents, lots and lots of algorithmic programs," said Balkin, a First Amendment scholar and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law. "The assumption most people make is they have a relationship with this thing, but what they have is a relationship with the company that makes and sells this thing." And that company may not always have the consumer's best interest in mind.

Greetings from CES, the annual consumer electronics extravaganza in Las Vegas that began as an opportunity for retailers to see what gadgets they'd be buying to sell to their customers in the coming year and has evolved into a see-and-be-seen event for the technology industry's elite. I led a conversation with Andrew Ng, the leader of Chinese Internet giant Baidu's artificial intelligence research unit. Ng is a Stanford professor who helped start Google Brain and co-founded online education firm Coursera. He is one of the world's foremost experts on AI who speaks clearly about the complicated topic in terms businesspeople can relate to. Get Data Sheet, Fortune's technology newsletter, where this essay originated. AI will become so important and is so confusing to most businesspeople that only an expert can help business leaders make sense of it.

Twitter can sometimes feel like a language of its own, but one lecturer is using the social media site as a tool to teach Arabic. In Mahammed Bouabdallah's classes at the University of Westminster, London, students are set simple tasks using Twitter to complement their lessons. Bouabdallah publishes a photo or link and asks students to comment on it in Arabic, or runs a Twitter poll about events happening in Arabic-speaking countries and discusses the results in class. Sometimes, they will use Twitter's built-in translation tool and judge its accuracy. "They have to tweet outside the class, and we discuss it inside the class," says Bouabdallah. His own research suggests that Twitter is popular as a language learning tool, with 80 per cent of surveyed students responding positively to its use.