Your parents just signed you up for some fancy Stanford Summer course in Artificial Intelligence. To be honest, you have no idea what Artificial Intelligence is except for robots or something; however, grownups think everything will have AI someday, so you better start learning now. You attend one of the best high schools in your country, and you tested well enough to get into the course, but you wonder whether you'd prefer your summers outside the classroom. On the first day, the instructor loads up a game of Pac-Man and asks if anyone has ever seen this game before. You pine for moments of screen time when you can explore the internet for new and interesting games; however, class time and game time have always been strictly and mutually exclusive.

Apple TV has grown up a lot since its iTV days. It's not just for iTunes rentals anymore--Apple TV handles just about anything we watch, from House of Cards to Game of Thrones and Major League Baseball games, and now that includes 4K content. Since Apple opened up its tiny streaming box to developers, it's gone from fun to indispensable. With an extensive library of apps, Siri support, and a drop-dead simple interface, Apple TV is one of the underrated players in Apple's lineup. Just like all those years ago, it's still the device that "completes the story" of Apple's entertainment ecosystem, and even without some of the bells and whistles of its competitors, Apple TV is still one of the best streaming boxes you can buy--from SD to HD to brilliant 4K.

One of the reasons Black Mirror is so thrilling--and terrifying--is that every episode of Netflix's tech-focused riff on The Twilight Zone is built on a situation that feels theoretically possible, if not inevitable. And that's certainly true for the fourth-season premiere, "USS Callister"--a smart Star Trek spoof that finds horror in artificial intelligence, invasive breaches of privacy and male egotism. The episode follows self-obsessed gaming engineer Robert Daly who devises a way to feed his coworkers' DNA into his code, then puts a Star Trek-esque mod on his company's program. Inside his digital starship, he tortures synthetic versions of his colleagues by turning them into hulking sci-fi monsters, banishing them to the outer planets Daly's starship explores and putting them through emotional hell. But the artificially-intelligent avatars are self-aware, eventually banding together to escape their creator's influence--by killing themselves.

"The Last Jedi" has millions of fans worldwide feeling the Force again this week. But for CMOs and their teams, there's another Force that's radically changed life as we know it: Data. Like the Force of Star Wars fame, data has light and dark elements. It is a raw, powerful resource that binds together every business transaction, process and system. And it can drive incredible customer experience transformation, if you have the right tools to tap into it. Advanced analytics is a fierce addition to our marketing arsenal, but it can't help us conquer the Dark Side of data to truly know our customers as individuals and respond to their unique wants, needs and struggles in real time.

December was a big month for advocates of regulating artificial intelligence. First, a bipartisan group of senators and representatives introduced the Future of A.I. Act, the first federal bill solely focused on A.I. It would create an advisory committee to make recommendations about A.I. -- on topics including …

Most technology companies are betting that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to big changes for their businesses. For some, it should make their operations more efficient.

Sophia the robot has been on a roll lately. Earlier in the year, its creator David Hanson told Jimmy Fallon that the bot is "basically alive." At the beginning of October, it showed up at the United Nations, announcing to delegates: "I am here to help humanity create the future." And just last week, Sophia was awarded an honorary citizenship by Saudi Arabia. "Sophia the robot becomes first humanoid Saudi citizen."

Poisson matrix factorization (PF) is a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) model (Lee and Seung, 1999) often used for recommender systems (Ma et al., 2011; Gopalan et al., 2015), text information retrieval (Canny, 2004; Buntine and Jakulin, 2006) or dictionary learning for image processing (Cemgil, 2009). The data is assumed to be drawn from the Poisson distribution making it specially well suited for count/integer-valued data. Since the Netflix Prize (Bennett et al., 2007), collaborative filtering (CF) has been giving the state-of-the-art results for recommender systems. CF exploits data relating users to items, like historical data. These data can either be explicit (ratings given by users to items) or implicit (count data from users listening to songs, clicking on web pages, watching videos, etc).

The year 2017 was a watershed moment for the Indian Banking industry, defined by reform tailwinds like demonetisation, digital India drive and global changes like rapid technological advances and an exponential rise in computing power. From experimentation of use cases on the Block chain technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to bolstering operations through Bots and RPA (robotic process automation), the industry is today geared to embrace challenges and opportunities of the future. It wouldn't, hence, be a hyperbole to define 2018 as the "Year of Cognitive Banking"; taking the industry to an inflection point by strategically blending technology with processes for real-time business impact. Banks will start meaningfully adopting machine learning tools and techniques to draw insights from various data points employed to collect customer's profile and transaction behavior, in order to predict user needs and design better customer experience. With increasing implementation of Big Data and Mobility Solutions by Banks, we could see a new wave of Analytics of Things or AOT, which would help banks analyze customer interactions with various devices on IoT and deploy this information to enhance customer experience and design better lending opportunities. As the current governing regime moves into the last year of its term, implementation of Smart Cities could see heightened activity and 2018 could herald interesting times for connected payments and IoT.

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." That's a famous quote often attributed to Mark Twain. Except that, like a lot of quotes attributed to Twain, he never said it or wrote it. It's also been attributed to Winston Churchill, but he didn't come up with it either. The same idea in different words also has been credited to Jonathan Swift, C. H. Spurgeon, Thomas Franklin, a Chinese proverb, an Arab proverb, and other sources.