The first hugely successful consumer application of deep learning will come to market: I predict that deep learning's first avid embrace by the general public will come in 2017. And I predict that it will be to process the glut of photos that people are capturing with their smartphones and sharing on social media. In this regard, the golden deep-learning opportunities will be in apps that facilitate image search, auto-tagging, auto-correction, embellishment, photorealistic rendering, resolution enhancement, style transformation, and fanciful figure inception. Where audio processing is concern, deep learning's first mainstream success in 2017 may very well be in composing music that feels like it was created by an actual human musician. Deep learning may also enter our lives in the coming year as the intelligence that driving a new generation of wearables that helps disabled people to see, hear, and otherwise sense their surroundings.

Perhaps the flat delivery, the Christmas word salad and the elementary melody tipped you off to the computer-generated nature of this performance. It's from a team at the University of Toronto Computer Science Department, which has been teaching a computer to write sing-along music. Dubbed "neural karaoke," this artificial intelligence system has been fed more than 100 hours of music to learn how to create simple melodies. It was also trained to recognize images and compose related lyrics. Listen: The Music From'Westworld' Is Finally Here Using an algorithm, the AI finds patterns in the data and essentially "learns" music -- including beats and chords. It learned the correlation between lyrics and music notes from around 50 hours of pop songs, says Hang Chu, one of the researchers.

The basic of neuronal networks are neurons. Neurons consists of a cell body, dendrites and axons. Neurons ceaselessly scan their environment for chemical gradients and for other neurons to connect. If a neuron cannot connect to other neurons it dies (no worries, we produce daily around 80'000 new neurons, no matter how old we are). The scanning is nothing else as the growing of the axons.

Facebook Inc is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning. The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material.

Google Home already allows you to control any connected Chromecast devices with simple voice commands, but if the device is really going to compete with Amazon's Echo line, it's going to need a bigger ecosystem to play in. Starting today, however, users with Sony speakers or Android TV sets can start taking advantage of Google Home's voice commands to control music and video streaming without the need for a complicated smart home setup. According to Sony, a firmware update for all its "Chromecast built-in" speakers and Android TV-equipped sets adds the missing support for Google's smart hub and personal assistant. That means commands like "OK Google, play Spotify on my Sony speaker" will automatically route the audio to your desired speaker. Likewise, calling out, "OK Google, play Stranger Things from Netflix on the TV" will also work with any of Sony's Android TV sets like the Bravia line or its latest 4K HDR panels.

What one piece of technology would most improve your working life? Chances are it wouldn't be a glove. But car workers in Germany are now using smart gloves that not only save time but prevent accidents as well. It is an example of how tech-enhanced humans are fighting back against the seemingly unstoppable rise of the robots. At BMW's spare parts plant in Dingolfing, for example, which employs around 17,500 people, hand-held barcode readers have been replaced by gloves that scan objects when you put your thumb and forefinger together.

The same tech we use to trade stocks, such as machine intelligence neural networks, really artificial intelligence, we use to influence elections. We just created a new digital species that influences, as well as buys/sells, no actually is seeking to manipulate attitudes and most likely votes. Hacking Reality used to influence elections and harness attitudes that consumers hold signals a new dangerous era of mass communications. This is information warfare on steroids. The nuanced soft war that goes on we don't talk much about.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is booming, with nearly every major player in the enterprise space vying for a foothold. IBM, Amazon, GE, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, SAP, HPE, Verizon--you name it, anybody and everybody, even folks who used to sell hardware--are actively working on and/or want to stake a claim in a piece of the AI pie. What encompasses the AI market? Machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), voice recognition and image processing, application and geography are what we're looking at, with mobile devices and cloud being the enablers. And just what will the AI market be?

You can only use a computer to paint like Van Gogh if, first, there is a real Van Gogh. This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavours might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be -- though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

Scientists at SONY CSL Research Lab have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence: "Daddy's Car" and "Mister Shadow". The researchers have developed FlowMachines, a system that learns music styles from a huge database of songs. "Daddy's Car" is composed in the style of The Beatles. French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics. The two songs are excerpts of albums composed by Artificial Intelligence to be released in 2017.