As we go into 2017 the incipient'technologisation' or'IT-isation', if you'll excuse the terms, of our lives is gathering pace and becoming much plainer to see. AI and deep learning are worth calling out for particular attention. In research consultancy Gartner's'Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2007' survey,[4] Gartner Vice-President and Fellow David Cearley said "over the next 10 years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI. This will form a long-term trend that will continually evolve and expand the application of AI and machine learning for apps and services." Deep learning, a machine learning technique, is emerging as AI's'killer app' enabler.

UK ISPs will begin sending out emails to subscribers later this month, warning them of movie, TV and music piracy identified on their connection and pointing them to legal content sources. Providers confirmed to ISPreview the voluntary programme will kick off later this month, with Virgin Media offering more details on how it'll work. If the ISP can link the IP address with a subscriber account, it'll send an email expected to contain an itemisation of the media in question, as well as links to bona fide content sources and other educational, anti-piracy resources. Torrents are the main target here, since it's easy to identify IP addresses due to the peer-to-peer nature of the network (as long as there's no VPN at play). Tracking people that turn to other sources of illegal media, such as direct download sites, is more complex.

Nokia is exploring the digital AI assistant space with a service called Viki. The details come from a European trademark application by Nokia Solutions and Networks Oy which describes Viki as "software for the creation and monitoring of mobile and web digital assistants working with knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice based interface." Speaking to Engadget's Jon Fingas, a Nokia spokesperson said "Nokia registers trademarks from time to time but we don't comment on how, whether or when they may be used for Nokia products or services." Although the rise of voice-powered digital assistants is tied in heavily to smartphones, there is no indication that Viki is going to make an appearance on a device in the near future. The recently announced Nokia 6 may carry the name of the Finnish company, but that name was licensed to HMD, along with access to a number of key patents.

Last Friday, the University of Ca' Foscari in Venice organized an IEEE workshop on the Human Use of Machine Learning (HUML 2016). The workshop, held at the European Centre for Living Technology, hosted roughly 30 participants and broadly addressed the social impacts and ethical problems stemming from the wide-spread use of machine learning. HUML joins a growing number workshops for critical voices in the ML community. These include Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML), the #Data4Good at ICML 2016, and Human Interpretability of Machine Learning (WHI), held this year at ICML and Interpretable ML for Complex Systems, held this year at NIPS. Among this company, HUML was notable especially notable for diversity of perspectives.

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford and director of both the Future of Humanity Institute and the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre "We are only 20 to 50 years away from Machine AI achieving human-level intelligence... and from reaching a human equivalent level of capability, AI is forecast to then see its progress take a rapid upward curve to super- intelligence.

ARMONK, N.Y. - 09 Jan 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it broke the U.S. patent record with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in 2016, marking the 24th consecutive year of innovation leadership. IBM's 2016 patent output covers a diverse range of inventions in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, cognitive health, cloud, cybersecurity and other strategic growth areas for the company. "Leading the world in innovation for 24 years in a row is a result of IBM's unmatched commitment to innovation and R&D–reflected in this year's new U.S. patent record, breaking the 8,000 barrier for the first time," said Ginni Rometty, IBM's chairman, president and CEO. "We are deeply proud of our inventors' unique contributions to discovery, science and technology that are driving progress across business and society and opening the new era of cognitive business." More than 8,500 IBM inventors residing in 47 states and territories and 47 countries are responsible for IBM's record-setting 2016 patent tally.

IBM was awarded the most patents in the US in 2016. IBM's efforts to match and surpass the human brain with computing technology helped push the company to the top of the 2016 list of patent awards. The US Patent and Trademark Office granted IBM 8,088 patents for the year, more than 2,700 of them stemming from artificial intelligence and cognitive computing work, IBM and IFI Claims said Monday. Next on the list was Samsung with 5,518 patents, Canon with 3,665, Qualcomm with 2,897 and Google with 2,835. In total, the USPTO granted 304,126 patents in 2016, 10 percent more than the year before, IFI Claims said.

The Government passed an "assault on freedom" while people were afraid and distracted, according to campaigners. Campaign group Liberty is requesting a High Court judicial review of the wide-ranging new spying tactics in the Investigatory Powers Act. That law was passed at the end of last year and gives spies – and a range of other organisations including the Food Standards Agency – the power to see anyone's entire internet history, alongside other unprecedented rules. The Liberty challenge will focus on bulk powers, which let intelligence agencies collect up huge amount of data in case it needs to be used in future, meaning that people not under investigation have their information watched. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

There are two competing nightmare scenarios for any company unveiling a new brand or logo. The first is that the internet will rise up in righteous indignation about how awful it is or what part of human anatomy it most resembles. The second and significantly scarier nightmare is that the logo is infringing on an existing trademark. The phenomenon, which is today often called design plagiarism, is often intentional--but can just as frequently be accidental. And no wonder: Searching for similar logos and marks is nearly impossible in the warren of databases of American trademarks, much less in any other country.

Human-robot relationships are a running theme in pop culture, from the cylons of Battlestar Galactica to Spike Jonze's film Her and last year's hit show Westworld. But that kind of scenario might not be science fiction much longer. Romance between humans and machines is already nearing the realm of the possible. This year, the California company Abyss Creations plans to start selling a new generation of high-tech sex robots -- dolls that can actually speak and respond to touch. And according to artificial intelligence expert Dr. David Levy, in a few generations, we won't just be having sex with robots, we'll be marrying them.