A true genius, Alan Turing was played brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch inThe Imitation Game -- the movie about his life and role in ending WWII -- which introduced him to a whole new generation of admirers. It was Turing who predicted machine learning would play a big role in modern computing in his article the "Turing Test," way back in 1950. Indeed, Turing was way ahead of his time, which was a major theme in the movie, but now the world has caught up. The major advancements in readily accessible computing power, the quantity of data available, and algorithms that truly make machine learning possible are driving our ability to process data, analyze it, and act on it in ways that would make Mr. Turing proud. These advances have completely changed the machine learning game: The fundamental concept remains the same, but now it's far more sophisticated, efficient, and easily deployable. Beyond the big headline-grabbing examples of how machine learning will impact our lives -- such as through driverless cars -- it has exciting potential to put an end to the bland and sometimes ineffective customer experiences that many retailers are delivering to their customers.

Winona Ryder ended up becoming the most memorable attendant of the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday after her hilarious series of expressive reactions to actor David Harbour's speech swept the internet. The actress, who stars alongside David in hit Netflix series "Stranger Things," could not control her wide-reaching range of emotions when her co-star chose to deliver a rousing speech as the cast were given the award for Best Ensemble Drama. In his speech, the actor appeared to take a jab of President Donald Trump and made his thoughts clear about the current political climate in the United States of America. Winona, 45, seemed somewhat unprepared for the actor's powerful and moving speech and led viewers on the journey of her reactions with increasingly dramatic facial expressions. The star jumped from surprise, confusion, understanding, shock and delight leading to viewers claiming she was basically a "human gif factory."

We have seen a fast growing interest in current activities around AI startups and research in the last couple of months. Headlines like "2016 was the year AI came of age", "AI was everywhere in 2016", and "The Great A.I. Awakening" were all over the media in the ending weeks of 2016 and we are curious about what 2017 will bring. I found particularly interesting that the current applications, future potential, and possible risks even attracted interest beyond the tech community through TV shows like Westworld, coverage on traditional media and even Obama's farewell address. Sadly, for many of us tech enthusiasts here in Europe, we sometimes feel like there is way less movement on this side of the Atlantic than in the Silicon Valley. However, with major acquisitions like DeepMind, Magic Pony Technology, Movidius, Vision Factory, and Dark Blue Labs, Europe has shown that it is actually leading the way in AI and machine learning.

Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies. So many works of film and fiction are hooked on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it might mean for humanity. They are often apocalyptic tales – Blade Runner, Alien, Terminator – where mankind comes off badly. But now that AI is being spearheaded by internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems – chat bots, purchase prediction, news generation – what will really happen? In 2015 the UK media widely picked up on American media organisation NPR's calculator that could predict which jobs are susceptible to computerisation.

We can't deny that artificial intelligence assistants have come flooding in the market lately. You have Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. Finnish tech company Nokia is also getting in on the AI Assistant bandwagon. Its name is Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant or simply MIKA. The announcement for Nokia's new AI voice assistant comes a month before Nokia's expected appearance at the Mobile World Congress.

Unsecured IoT devices were used to launch crippling DDOS attacks in October 2016, targeting services such as Twitter, Spotify, and GitHub. Subsequent testimony to Congress about potential attacks on office buildings, schools, and hospitals raised the possibility for the IoT to harm and even kill people. Does the government need to intervene? In this power panel at @ThingExpo New York, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, leading IoT and security experts will discuss this very serious topic. Roger Strukhoff is Conference Chair of Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData IoT Journals.

Add write pop music hits to the list of things that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now do. As well as write poetry and novels, AI is now being used to create music by a Grammy-nominee producer, who collaborated with IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform on his newest release. Alex Da Kid used Watson to analyze the composition of five years' worth of Billboard songs, as well as cultural artefacts such as newspaper articles, film scripts and social media commentary. The idea was to understand the "emotional temperature" of the time period, and use this to inform Alex's creative process. I asked him to explain how the insights from the data contributed to the finished work, and he told me "Watson scraped millions of conversations, newspaper headlines and speeches – all of which showed me how emotionally volatile we as humans are and have been, particularly over the last five years."

A kind of ethics fever has taken hold of the AI community. As smart machines displace human jobs and seem poised to make life-or-death decisions in self-driving cars and health care, concerns about where AI is taking us are gaining increasing urgency. Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies' social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City.

Do you think you can tell a piece of music composed by artificial intelligence (AI) from one created by a human composer? Before you read any further, let's find out. The following audio consists of two fragments, one written by AI, the other by a human. If you didn't get it right the first time, no worries--we'll have a couple more mini-quizzes like this below. The AI that wrote the fragment above has been programmed by Jukedeck, a UK-based startup working on machine-made music that won the competition at TechCrunch Disrupt London in 2015.

It's still rough around the edges, but FaceApp demonstrates the scary future of neural network-based image editing. Neural networks are revolutionizing computing, and image editing is one area that will experience drastic changes. Already, apps like Prisma are demonstrating this power, but a new company is using neural networks in a different way with an app called FaceApp. Unlike Prisma, which keeps the content of a source photo but changes the style, FaceApp looks to change the content while maintaining photorealism. Available now as a free download for iOS, with an Android version coming soon, FaceApp currently offers six filters: Smile, Hot, Young, Old, Male, and Female.