From winning Jeopardy in 2011 to helping write a sad song last year, IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform is all over popular culture. Press releases fly out about Watson producing a movie trailer, powering a Macy's shopping app, even controlling lights on an internet-connected dress -- along with more serious applications like working on cancer treatments. It seems, from IBM's hype, that Watson can do everything. But Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief innovation officer, wants to dial back the hype in some ways, calling Watson "just the first step on a very, very long road." Watson can be helpful in a lot of industries, such as medicine, which are awash in data, but it can't replace people, he says.

Chinese social media is currently alight with the news that some of the country's top Go players have been beaten multiple times, not by a human, but by a robot, which has now been revealed to be a software program called AlphaGo run on Google's deep learning neural network DeepMind. In March 2016, DeepMind made international news when the AlphaGo program succeeded in beating the Go world champion player Lee Sedo, 33, from South Korea by 4-1. DeepMind is a neural network – essentially a large web of artificially intelligent classical computers that are trained using computer algorithms to solve complex problems in a similar way to the human central nervous system. The computers are separated into different groups known as'layers' to examine different parts of the problem, and each layer's answer is then combined to produce a final answer. Go is an ancient Chinese abstract strategy game that originated over 2,500 years ago and is considered to be more complex than chess.

One of the undisputable realities of moving into a digital work era is the continuous improvement in technologies which mimic and replicate what human employees are doing. The introduction of'bots' into the workplace to perform logic-based and repetitive tasks is becoming a common occurrence. These task robots are able to perform activities faster, with greater accuracy and more efficiently that their human colleagues. In fact their capacity is close to 700 per cent greater than the human employee, who generally works at a 60 per cent utilisation rate for 7-8 hours a day, can be absent for a variety of reasons, doesn't work 7 days a week, and who's productivity is influenced by a plethora of human frailties. It's no wonder'bots' are attractive to organisations for this type of work.

With the 2016 coming close, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has completed his personal challenge to built "Jarvis," his AI-powered personal assistant. In his lengthy blog post, Zuck describes the types of tasks his Jarvis bot can accomplish. The personal assistant or what few call a butler, is customized to perform multiple actions at Mark's residence. Mark's simple AI to run his home -- like Jarvis in Iron Man, uses several AI techniques including speech and face recognition, reinforcement learning, natural language processing. It is written in PHP, Objective C and Python. In coming years, Zuckerberg has expansion plans for his AI Bot, he cited building an Android app and setting up the Jarvis voice terminals in the entire house.

India: American technology major Nvidia has launched the Nvidia Inception programme in India, in recognition of the country's budding innovation ecosystem in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Inception is a virtual incubator programme to support startups with revolutionary ideas in AI. Members will receive a custom set of benefits, from hardware grants and marketing support to training with deep learning experts. The Inception Programme was launched in India at the inaugural Nvidia Emerging Companies Summit India, part of the GPU Technology Conference (GTCx), a platform for the brightest minds and greatest ideas in GPU computing. The momentum around AI among Indian innovators is so significant that, at launch, the Inception Programme already has close to 100 Indian startups as members.

A mattress might be the last thing you'd dream of applying machine learning to, but your bed is where you spend a third of your life. And if it can help you sleep better, that could improve the hours of the day when you're not sleeping, as well. Now, there's a bed that promises to do some of the thinking for us to streamline our sleep time. At CES 2017, as I plopped myself down on the Sleep Number 360 smart bed, I wanted to find out: Can AI really us sleep better? Sure, it was conformable, and, yes, I looked ridiculous, but it's all for science.

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the increasing reliance on architectural choices for improvements in power, performance and area, with Sundari Mitra, CEO of NetSpeed Systems; Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Simon Davidmann CEO of Imperas; John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP and prototyping at Synopsys; and Chris Rowen, a consultant at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Can IP be designed for an entire system, and does that change what has to be done architecturally? Janac: If you are using layers and stacks, you can go all the way from layout into architecture for a particular piece of a chip. It gets used by the architect, by the RTL developer, by the layout person, by the verification engineer, for what is essentially a vertical slice of the chip.

In 2017 Artificial Intelligence (AI) will redefine the possibilities of research and academia. Some doomsayers assume that most human employees will soon be replaced by smart machines. But I think that AI techniques will make many jobs better and more innovative. Bringing AI to the world of academic research, for example, will be akin to how Galileo's creation of the astronomical telescope in 1609 radically advanced the study of cosmology. For the Failure Institute (the research arm of the Fuckup Nights movement) AI will improve the speed and level of complexity at which we study how businesses and ideas fail.

Continuing their push to jointly develop self-driving vehicles, Intel (INTC), Mobileye (MBLY) and BMW (BMWYY) say they will put a fleet of about 40 autonomous vehicles on the road by the second half of 2017. The announcement, made at the CES show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, follows the partnership established by BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye last July. BMW plans to use Mobileye and Intel technology for "highly and fully automated driving" in the BMW iNext, an all-electric vehicle. The 40 autonomous vehicles will demonstrate "the significant advancements made by the three companies toward fully autonomous driving," according to a joint press release. They said the BMW 7 Series will employ cutting-edge Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials that will start in the U.S. and Europe.

P-values for coefficients of cylinders, horsepower and acceleration are all greater than 0.05. This means that the relationship between the dependent and these independent variables is not significant at the 95% certainty level. I'll drop 2 of these variables and try again. High p-values for these independent variables do not mean that they definitely should not be used in the model. It could be that some other variables are correlated with these variables and making these variables less useful for prediction (check Multicollinearity).