Each year at the CES technology show, companies like LG, Samsung, and Intel flaunt their latest innovations. Supercomputers the size of a credit card, 4K TVs as thin as wallpaper, and smartphones that can 3D map their environment were just a few of the inventions showcased during this year's exhibition. But while CES can be a showcase for trends that are likely to dominate the tech world over the coming months, it's also home to the bizarre and strange. This year's conference, which officially concluded on Jan. 8, included demonstrations of everything from "smart" hairbrushes to "intelligent" toothbrushes and shoes that suck up dust and crumbs as you walk. You know what your next hair brush really needs?

LG is planning to improve the Smart Doctor, Quick Help, and LG Electronics Remote Consulting apps with machine learning features and other solutions powered by advanced artificial intelligence technologies, the South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer announced on Monday. The company's decision to ennoble its set of mobile tools comes as a part of a more general strategy to implement machine learning technology into after sales smartphone services. In addition to artificial intelligence, the Seoul-based tech giant is also looking into ennobling its services with big data analytics and similar solutions. The update process is expected to start during the first quarter of the year with the company currently focusing on providing remote after sales services via its selection of apps. While the Quick Help app is still only available in South Korea, LG promised to bring it to North America later this year.

How do you know what machine learning algorithm to choose for your classification problem? Of course, if you really care about accuracy, your best bet is to test out a couple different ones (making sure to try different parameters within each algorithm as well), and select the best one by cross-validation. But if you're simply looking for a "good enough" algorithm for your problem, or a place to start, here are some general guidelines I've found to work well over the years. If your training set is small, high bias/low variance classifiers (e.g., Naive Bayes) have an advantage over low bias/high variance classifiers (e.g., kNN), since the latter will overfit. But low bias/high variance classifiers start to win out as your training set grows (they have lower asymptotic error), since high bias classifiers aren't powerful enough to provide accurate models.

The claim that cars will soon safely drive themselves on public roads -- more safely than humans -- sounds fantastic, if not impossible. Yet breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, a concept that's becoming more familiar to non-computer scientists, are powering technological advances that likely will bring many driverless capabilities within reach of automakers in the next five years. Many of the AI principles used by developers of autonomous and driverless software are based on the same used by IBM (IBM), which developed a chess program that first defeated a world champion in 1996, and by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Deep Mind unit that last week defeated the world Go champion. Alphabet is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells GOOGL?

As technology like artificial intelligence and autonomous abilities have become popular, more car companies have joined in on the development process. At CES 2017, Chinese search company Baidu and state-owned car company BAIC Group announced a partnership to develop self-driving cars for the Chinese marketplace. According to Bloomberg, the companies look to debut its car at the Shanghai automotive show in April. Live testing for the car is also planned by the end of the year. Notably, the planned car will be slated to have Level 3 autonomous abilities.

The development of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles is accelerating. Here's how they could affect consumers and companies. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a major innovation for the automotive industry, but their potential impact with respect to timing, uptake, and penetration remains hazy. While high levels of uncertainty currently surround the issue, the ultimate role that AVs could play regarding the economy, mobility, and society as a whole could be profound. In an effort to look beyond today's rapidly changing predictions on AV penetration, we interviewed more than 30 experts across Europe, the United States, and Asia and combined these findings with our insights to arrive at ten thought-provoking potential implications of self-driving cars. The widespread use of AVs could profoundly affect a variety of industry sectors.

Don't miss new Futurology videos! Enchance your focus and concentration like you never thought possible: http://bit.ly/2iPoRWl Watch other videos: This Is How Quantum Computing Will Change The World: https://youtu.be/0Hlssbyc49o This Is How Artificial Intelligence Will Change The World: https://youtu.be/ngt9O_fojbc Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Near: https://youtu.be/zA80t6ZSRzo

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

Poker Pro Dong Kim shown here in the first Brains vs. AI contest in 2015. Four of the world's best professional poker players will compete against artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University in an epic rematch to determine whether a computer can beat humans playing one of the world's toughest poker games. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante," beginning Jan. 11 at Rivers Casino, poker pros will play a collective 120,000 hands of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em over 20 days against a CMU computer program called Libratus. The pros -- Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou -- are vying for shares of a $200,000 prize purse. The ultimate goal for CMU computer scientists, as it was in the first Brains Vs. AI contest at Rivers Casino in 2015, is to set a new benchmark for artificial intelligence. "Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field," said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science. "That was achieved with chess in 1997, with Jeopardy! in 2009 and with the board game Go just last year.

Every year at CES, some of the world's biggest tech companies try to one-up each other. TVs get thinner and brighter. Home appliances get chattier and robots get friendlier. But this year, instead of standing out for their memorable devices, a lot of companies showed up with a shared identity: the voice of Alexa. Within a span of just two years, Amazon's cloud-based voice service has spread far beyond the Echo speaker where it first debuted.