As the great Kenny Rogers once said, a good gambler has to know when to hold'em and know when to fold'em. At the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh this week, a computer program called Libratus may finally prove that computers can do this better than any human card player. Libratus is playing thousands of games of heads-up, or two-player, no-limit Texas hold'em against several expert professional poker players. Now a little more than halfway through the 20-day contest, Libratus is up by almost $800,000 against its human opponents. So victory, while far from guaranteed, may well be in the cards. A win for Libratus would be a huge achievement in artificial intelligence.

Taking artificial intelligence a step further, a new Socially-Aware Robot Assistant (SARA) took the participants of the World Economic Forum (WEF) here by surprise by understanding their spoken words and non-verbal behaviour to build a relationship. Developed by students and professors of prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a research project, SARA became a key exhibit at the WEF annual meeting held in this ski resort town last week. CMU President Subra Suresh, who was here for the WEF, said the university would also take SARA to other parts of the world, which may include India, for exhibition and eventually, it may be licensed to some company or organisation for commercial use, but any decision on that will be taken by the persons concerned and professors at the university. "With technology advancing so fast, one of the opportunities for us is whether we can combine robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc to create tools that will have positive impact on society. This is how SARA has come out," Suresh told PTI in an interview here on the sidelines of the WEF meet.

Techies around the world would have been hard-wired for insights last week as the DLD17 conference in Munich and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos ran concurrently. The former – populated by academics and innovators – was marked by a frisky anticipation over technological possibilities, while the latter – made up of politicians and business leaders – succumbed to fear and uncertainty over global events, even as the sun shone outside. Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, speaking in Davos, said: "Unlike the industrial revolution, our fourth technological revolution is unfolding at an exponential, and not linear, pace". One statistic that came out of the meeting was how Hollywood box office takings have been outpaced by App revenues – even though they didn't exist before 2008. Premier Xi opened his address with a quote from Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", to highlight the many contradictions facing modern society.

You are driving along and your car's brakes suddenly fail. If it swerves to the left, three old men and two elderly women will die. If the car veers to the right, it kills a woman doctor, two babies and a boy and girl. This question is part of MIT Media Lab's "moral machine," a platform for gathering peoples' opinions on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. In the coming age of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), such life and death decisions and many other complicated ones will increasingly be made by machines rather than people.

That's the opinion of Stephen Hawking along with other leaders in the AI field, noted in a 2014 article in The Independent. Much of the media portrays a negative perception of AI, publishing articles and airing news segments about the technology with images of The Terminator. However, not many members of the media are asking what can be done to reap the benefits of the technology and avoid the risks. Those questions require a deeper look, which is why the IEEE Standards Association formed the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, for which I serve as vice chair. In the past year, the initiative brought together more than 100 experts to collaborate on the report "Ethically Aligned Design."

In yet another episode of man versus machine, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Melon University has been absolutely dismantling a team of professional poker players, accumulating a staggering lead of almost $800,000. The showdown takes place as part of the "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" competition which pits a group of four poker pros against the crafty supercomputer Libratus in a heads-up game of No-Limit Texas Hold'em slated to continue for 120,000 hands. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. Since January 11 when the contest initially kicked off, the players have now passed the midway point of the the race, having completed almost 65,000 hands in total. What is more intriguing is that so far Libratus has managed to keep an impressive lead over its human opponents, stacking up a profit of $794,392.

Patrick Stobbs recently sat in a conference room here playing songs from his smartphone, attempting to show how his start-up, Jukedeck, is at the cutting edge of music. The tune sounded like the soundtrack to a 1980s video game. "This is where we were two years ago," he said, looking slightly embarrassed. "And this is where we are now," he continued. He then played a gentle piano piece.

The history of artificial intelligence is littered with false starts, but Goldman Sachs Research's Heath Terry says we've reached a turning point that will put the technology within reach across sectors. He explains how a growing web of interconnected devices, systems and sensors is helping to fuel development and delves into AI's potential to impact "every industry."

The next iPhone is going to entirely do away with the home button at the bottom of the screen. The much-rumoured – and potentially already previewed – removal of the button has long been thought to be one of the major changes coming to the next phone. But a new report sheds light on how potentially the biggest design change ever to come to the iPhone will actually work. In the place of the characteristic round button will come a special sensor embedded in the screen. And that will be the beginning of a range of new additions that could eventually become an entire biometric system for checking who is using the phone.

Last year I wrote an overview post which defines a number of key concepts related to data science -- including data science itself -- and attempts to explain how these pieces fit together into a so-called "data science puzzle." As a new year begins, and a previous year worth of advances, insights, and accomplishments get rolled into our collective professional outlook, I thought it would be prudent to revisit this puzzle, noting and incorporating any changes and updates which may contribute to rearranging the puzzle for the foreseeable future, and to provide some addition commentary where warranted. Big Data is still important to data science. Take your pick of metaphors, but any way you look at it, Big Data is the raw material that has continues to fuel the data science revolution. As relates to Big Data, I believe that justification of data-acquisition and -retention from a business point of view, expectations that Big Data projects start providing actual financial returns, and the challenges related to data privacy and security will become the big Big Data stories not only of 2017 but moving forward in general.