Microsoft's 2017 may as well be known as the year the company turned away from the consumer and, sadly, back toward the enterprise. This past year was notable for two casualties: Microsoft's phone business finally died, as did Groove Music, the music subscription service that Microsoft abandoned in favor of Spotify. In fact, you could argue that Microsoft's software and services didn't succeed nearly as well as its hardware, where a new generation of Surfaces and Xbox One consoles were generally well received. It didn't help that management seemed to feel that staid enterprise Azure and Office 365 represented Microsoft's future, either. Now, question marks hang over Microsoft's plans for 2018. The spark is there, but will consumers care?

And just as we've seen over the past few years, more cord-cutting means more new streaming services, along with better devices on which to watch. Here's the best of everything that cord-cutting had to offer this year: Roku's Streaming Stick isn't the first 4K HDR device to hit $70--that honor went to Google's Chromecast Ultra last year--but it's by far the best value. The Streaming Stick combines Roku's fast and simple interface with a new remote that includes handy buttons for TV volume and power. Unless you feel like spending more than double on an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield TV, this is the UltraHD streamer to get. Calling the Nvidia Shield TV a platform might not be fair, since it's based on the same Android TV software as several other smart TVs and streaming boxes.

This hebbian/anti-hebbian rule (see below) efficiently converges deep models in the context of a Reinforcement Learning regime. In a nutshell the rule says if there is no pre-synaptic spike then there will be no weight change (to preserve connections that were not responsible). Otherwise the direction of weight change will depend on whether a post-synaptic spike occured and whether there was a reward. I have not been able to find much existing work re: local rules for deep models, however it's quite likely this rule exists elsewhere..

What if artificial intelligence was the nurturing humus that the publishing industry and blogs need to bloom again? What if the future of blogging was in the virtual hands of an army of machines that can work together with professional writers to build and spread knowledge? This is the story of Samur Isma, founder and publisher of the online design magazine FREEYORK, which publishes 25-30 articles a week employing just two editors. How do they do this? Let's look closer to understand Samur's visionary model.

True story: one of my social media connections asked for recommendations for reliable new sources and got a few outlets named, though some of us -- myself included -- said that you simply cannot rely wholly on any single source and have to check through multiple sources to be sure you get the full picture of the facts in context to find where the truth lies. But not everyone is sophisticated enough to be aware that reports they see -- even from outlets with solid reputations -- need to be taken with a grain of salt. That's why Valentinos Tzekas founded FightHoax, the creator of an AI-powered algorithm that empowers anyone to ascertain if an article is fake or not in just seconds without Googling the story. Described with the tagline, "Fighting against the mass misinformation spread," FightHoax claims an accuracy rate of 89% based on the most recent and most user-requested 172 fact-checked articles). It is still in private beta and not fully public.

As writer William Gibson put it: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." Many of us are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) on a daily basis, from Netflix recommending our next binge-watch to Uber connecting us with the closest available driver or online chatbots helping to solve our customer service issues. Increasingly, cities too are looking to AI to improve services for residents and streamline operations, and at a recent workshop I attended at the Smart City InFocus event in Yinchuan, China, city leaders clearly pinpointed AI as the most "impactful" and "disruptive" technology (or set of technologies) that they need to respond to. Such is the perceived importance that last month, the United Arab Emirates government launched its AI Strategy and appointed its first Minister for AI. The 2031 strategy targets using AI to "disrupt government", eyeing a $15.7 trillion global economic opportunity by 2030, a 50 per cent reduction in government costs and massively increased resistance to financial crises.

Artificial intelligence (AI) takes the power of computing systems to a different level. It is amazing to even think that a computing system can emulate human beings. There are many fantastic examples of AI in various areas of our lives. That said, computing systems are still considered limited in their capabilities because they cannot think creatively like human beings. While AI can process and analyze complex data, it still does not have much prowess in areas that involve abstract, nonlinear and creative thinking.

The ability to argue, to express our reasoning to others, is one of the defining features of what it is to be human. Processes of argumentation run our governments, structure scientific endeavour and frame religious belief. So should we worry that new advances in artificial intelligence are taking steps towards equipping computers with these skills? As technology reshapes our lives, we are all getting used to new ways of working and new ways of interacting. Millennials have known nothing else.

Up to half of all jobs in Britain are vulnerable to a revolution in robotic technology and artificial intelligence that threatens to replace human workers with machines, … response to the economic challenge, with the establishment of a regulator to oversee the "ethical use of robotics and artificial intelligence".

The government must intervene to stop automation driving up wage inequality, a think tank has warned. The Institute for Public Policy Research said robots would not necessarily be bad for the economy. However, it warned lower-skilled jobs were much more likely to be phased out in the coming decades, and only higher-skilled workers would be able to command better wages. The government said it was committed to making automation work for everyone. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - a centre-left think tank - automation could raise UK productivity growth by between 0.8 to 1.4% annually, and boost GDP by 10% by 2030.