It's the last day of 2016 and many of us are already planning a better 2017. And we are not alone on that. Many tech companies have plans to bring many and exciting technology trends. Some of them have already made an impact on 2016 and the new year might bring more features. Let's check the most noticeable technology trends for 2017.

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act is now in effect, placing Britain under some of the widest-ranging spying powers ever seen. The law – passed last month but going into effect on 30 December – is intended as an update to Britain's often unwieldy surveillance legislation. But it also includes a large set of new powers – including the ability to collect the browsing records of everyone in the country and have them read by authorities as diverse as the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions. Most of the central parts of the act are now in force. That includes new powers to gather and retain data on citizens, and new ways to force technology companies and others to hand over the data that they have about people to intelligence agencies.

AI and machine learning promise to not only improve the customer experience, but also change the way companies operate. For this reason, enterprises should consider integrating these technologies into digital transformation plans to stay competitive. By 2019, 40 percent of all digital transformation initiatives will be supported by cognitive/AI capabilities, according to IDC. "The time for AI has now finally come, because of the technique of deep reasoning connected with the amazing amounts of computer power and data," said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer of Genpact. The opportunity now is to apply those technologies in the business context." For example, we can now use AI for account management and customer service systems across industries. "The benefit isn't just the fact that you get productivity, but the fact that you can scale very quickly," Srivastava said. Gartner predicted that by 2018, 20 percent of business content (such as shareholder reports, legal documents, and ...

The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I'd regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen. Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz), who does a monthly #eweekchat on twitter, covers many of the worries facing organizations. People focus so much on the'things' themselves rather than the risk of an internet connection. This list discusses how IoT will grow up in 2017, how having a service component will be key, the complete mess of standards and simply, 'just because you can connect something to the Internet doesn't mean that you should.' NW talks about how cyber attacks will get worse due to IoT and gives some ideas on how to protect your data in 2017.

Today's tech buzzword, Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a difficult concept for many people to wrap their heads around. AI technology, which arguably holds vast potential to revolutionize the way the world works, is nonetheless often used to paint an apocalyptic view of the future. We now live in a world where talking computers and self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future – but are we also at risk of developing computers so smart that they can replace humans? Influential tech figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have cautioned the industry against diving head-on into AI – because the technology's implementation could do more harm than good if we aren't careful. While there's no arguing that some of the cautionary tales around AI hold merit, our current reality is far from the robot-run society we've seen in the movies.

Insomnobot has been described as "easily distracted." It was 2:37 a.m. and every moment of wakefulness that passed would leave me more tired in the morning, but I just couldn't fall back asleep. At the very least, I could use someone to talk to. This was no fellow insomniac, nor the hotline for Night Owls Anonymous. It was Insomnobot-3000, a chatbot designed by mattress company Casper to keep company with the sleepless from 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. EST, while most humans are catching their Zs.

A theme in my blogs is how the "structure" of data - rather than just the "content" - affects what that data can say and is capable of doing. In particular, I suggest that certain structures tend to reinforce certain contents; this means that a structural imposition can have an effect similar to a contextual imposition. Structure is an interesting conversation because, at first glance, arguably data has none. Structure is something that is attributed to physical things. But data normally has no physical existence - at least not in a tangible sense except maybe in relation to storage devices. Yet I am certain that almost everyone who has programmed in an object-oriented language has had to deal with multifarious data structures.

At KDnuggets, we try to keep our finger on the pulse of main events and developments in industry, academia, and technology. We also do our best to look forward to key trends on the horizon. We recently asked some of the leading experts in Big Data, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning for their opinion on the most important developments of 2016 and key trends they 2017. "What were the main Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning related events in 2016 and what key trends do you see in 2017?" Common themes include the triumphs of deep neural networks, reinforcement learning's successes, AlphaGo as exemplar of the power of both of these phenomena in unison, the application of machine learning to the Internet of Things, self-driving vehicles, and automation, among others. We generally asked participants to keep their responses to within 100 words or so, but were amenable to longer answers if the situation warranted.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation, there is no debate that advances in these areas will engender profound changes in our world. Rather, the debate centers on what these changes might look like. There are many who express concern or even outright fear about the impact of AI on our future, and with good reason. A recent report from Forrester predicts that by 2021, intelligent agents and related robots will have eliminated 6% of a net jobs. A widely noted study, "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?", estimates that 47% of all US jobs are at risk. The Luddites were textiles workers who protested automation, eventually attacking and burning factories because, "they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood".

There are more bots on the internet than humans. According to figures from Distil Networks, a cybersecurity firm, almost 60 percent of 2014's internet traffic consisted of automated code. Despite the world's growing population of internet users, that figure is undoubtedly higher today. Among the oldest of those bots is ELIZA, who turns 50 this year. ELIZA, who was written at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the mid-1960s by a German-Jewish computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum, can perform natural language processing and pattern match users' responses to different scripts.