Explore and capture the night sky from the palm of your hand--Tiny1 is powerful enough to image deep sky objects but compact enough to fit in your pocket. The camera has a searchable augmented reality map that guides you to and identifies stars and constellations, and it connects with your smartphone to share photos and videos directly to social media. Tiny1 is available for preorder at US$479; delivery is expected December 2017. How do you think AI will most substantially benefit humankind in the future? It seems no opinion holds a majority, but many respondents anticipated advancements in science and medicine.

Science-fiction film costume designers create sartorial future worlds and, if they get it right, can influence current trends along the way. Here, we ask a few forward-looking costume designers to describe their favorite piece from each of their current films and, interestingly, the choices were anything but outrageously fantastical -- they ranged from the lovely and nostalgic to the manly and the fussy. Luis Sequeira's favorite costume is Elisa's (Sally Hawkins) enchanting dream-sequence dress. Set against the film's lush, dark, moody world of the early '60s, the black-and-white dream sequence "is pure light and love," says Sequeira. "It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film."

The year 2017 saw artificial intelligence bringing the stuff of science fiction closer to reality by not only gaining a foothold in all spheres of life but also getting the better of humans in many fields.

NASA is already planning a mission in 2069, we watch an iPhone X camouflage your face, and combine sex, robots and popular culture. Hype matters more than quality.Will Smith's'Bright' is terrible, but that doesn't matter to Netflix Despite a low Rotten Tomatoes review score (32 percent), Bright could still be the algorithmically-created hit Netflix is seeking. If you have a TV, you can explore most of the issues yourself.You don't need a Ph.D. to grasp the anxieties around sex robots Many of the preoccupations that were on display at the third International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots are ones previously explored in pop culture. From Futurama to Westworld, going back to Weird Science and The Stepford Wives, the questions that academics are currently pondering have already been played out, fictionally at least, on TV. To spare you a lot of very dry reading, we offer this guide on what you should be watching.

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.