DeepTraffic is a gamified simulation of typical highway traffic. Your task is to build a neural agent – more specifically design and train a neural network that performs well on high traffic roads. Your neural network gets to control one of the cars (displayed in red) and has to learn how to navigate efficiently to go as fast as possible. The car already comes with a safety system, so you don't have to worry about the basic task of driving – the net only has to tell the car if it should accelerate/slow down or change lanes, and it will do so if that is possible without crashing into other cars. The page consists of three different areas: on the left you can find a real time simulation of the road, with different display options, using the current state of the net.

Brand-new global information infrastructure design doesn't come along every day. The internet of things (IoT) presents a rare opportunity to build global information infrastructure from scratch -- a new, more expansive, and capable set of functions on the periphery of what already exists. But the truly new IoT that's expected is only now emerging. At the moment, what's being developed is really just a nervous system of sorts -- protocols, communications pathways, local processing and storage, endpoints embedded in various places, and ways for things to talk to and interpret one another. But what would the things say to each other?

The emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) will inevitably transform the world in many ways – some that are desirable and others that are not. The extent to which the benefits are maximized and the risks mitigated will depend on the quality of governance – the rules, norms, standards, incentives, institutions, and other mechanisms that shape the development and deployment of each particular technology. Too often the debate about emerging technologies takes place at the extremes of possible responses: among those who focus intently on the potential gains and others who dwell on the potential dangers. The real challenge lies in navigating between these two poles: building understanding and awareness of the trade-offs and tensions we face, and making informed decisions about how to proceed. This task is becoming more pressing as technological change deepens and accelerates, and as we become more aware of the lagged societal, political and even geopolitical impact of earlier waves of innovation.

The market of voice-controlled assistants is on fire at the moment. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant, just to name a few, are the most well-known digital assistants that are currenlty dominating the market. Their cornerstone lies in an aim to provide a seamless and hands-free experience, which empowers us and eases our daily lives. From playing music to ordering pizza, voice assistants seem to be taking the market by storm. In 2015 1.7 million voice-first devices have been shipped, and 6.5 million in 2016, that excluding the mobile-built in voice services. VoiceLabs, a voice software start-up, foresees that by the end of 2017 more than 24 million devices will find their new families and homes, totalling at 33 million voice-first gadgets in circulation.

AI has already been applied to customer engagement in various forms, and there's an evolution underway. First AI appeared in tools and appliances used for customer engagement. More recently chatbots have emerged. "Chatbots are very good at taking natural language and extracting intent from that: 'Play the music for me. Tell me the weather,'" Sutton said.

While it may feel novel to mess around with a customer service chatbot, there may come a day in the future where artificial intelligence, or AI, is the primary way you interact with companies. That's one of the big trends outlined in IT consulting firm Accenture's report, out today, on the technology that will change businesses in the next three years. Once tech like AI filters through the powers that be, it may very well land right in front of you, the consumer. Accenture surveyed more than 5,400 business and IT executives. And yes, AI and other technologies are on their minds.

Researchers at Stanford University have created an AI algorithm that can identify skin cancer as well as a professional doctor. The program was trained on nearly 130,000 images of moles, rashes, and lesions using a technique known as deep learning. It was then tested head-to-head against 21 human dermatologists, where its creators say it performed with an accuracy on par with humans ("at least" 91 percent as good). In the future, they suggest it could be used to create a mobile app for spotting skin cancer at home. Each year in the United States, some 5.4 million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed.

There was no shortage of gadgets at CES, and there will be no shortage at Toy Fair next month, of robots and gadgets promising artificial intelligence -- and generally falling short. But a more modest approach from an actual AI researcher has produced a clever and accessible way to create lifelike behavior through a simple and elegant modification of a popular existing robot. The kit is called bots_alive, and it's looking for a mere $15,000 on Kickstarter. I talked with creator Brad Knox about the tech at CES, and came away pleased with the simplicity of the design at a time when overbearing, talking, dancing robot toys seem to be the norm. It works like this: you start with a Hexbug Spider, a remote control legged toy robot you can buy for $25. They're normally operated with a tiny infrared controller.

Sky is going to let people watch all of its TV channels without a satellite dish for the first time ever. The company is going to let people watch its full TV service through broadband instead of installing an entire satellite dish on their house. The move is apparently an attempt to stop the rate of "churn" at Sky – how many people join the service and then leave. The announcement came as Sky revealed surging numbers of people leaving to competitors like BT – up to 11.6 per cent from 10.2 per cent last year. Those same results showed a 9 per cent fall in earnings because of the increased price of football rights.

Windows 7 turns eight this year. It's as old as the iPhone 3GS, yet it remains the most popular flavor of Windows by far. Microsoft has updated Windows twice since then, but Windows 7 runs on roughly twice as many machines across the globe as Windows 10, the most recent version of the venerable OS. Here in the US, Windows 10 usage recently surpassed that of Windows 7, but Microsoft wants it running on every Windows machine. That's because the company calls it "the last version of Windows," a code base designed to be improved and augmented, not replaced.