Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming the biggest issue on the agenda for many businesses. The current speed of development, the sheer range of possible applications, and the potential impact of AI suggest that it's time for CEOs to pay attention. So, what are the questions every CEO should be asking? Futurist Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Publishing believes there are ten questions that need to be asked in order to assess and invest in AI's transformative potential: 1. AI will change the philosophy, practice and management of business. It is beginning to transform businesses and replace even senior management and leadership roles.

DeLiang Wang was in college when his mother began to lose her hearing in the 1980s. Today, she struggles to listen to and participate in a conversation, even with her hearing aids. Dinners with her large family are frustrating and, often, exhausting. At 91, she is "essentially deaf," Wang said, because her hearing aids provide so little benefit that she seldom wears them. So Wang, now a professor computer science and engineering at Ohio State University, is building a better hearing aid, with some help from GPUs and deep learning.

Despite some significant arrivals, 2016 also failed to deliver some long-awaited technologies. And some of what we eagerly ripped the wrapping paper off proved to be a letdown. Here's a rundown of the gifts IT didn't get in 2016. If you want to print out a stand for your phone or a model for a new product, you can easily find a 3D printer for the office that can do that -- as long as you want to print them out in plastic. You can spend more and get a 3D printer that can UV cure resin and make small objects like custom-fit earplugs in about 10 minutes (I watched my ACS Custom in-ear monitor headphones get printed from digital scans of my ear canals earlier this year). Even HP's $140,000 Multi Jet Fusion printers -- promised for this year and offering multi-color printing -- only just went on sale, and they still only print nylon.

December 27, 2016 --Apple, a company known for their secrecy, announced at a conference earlier this month that their artificial intelligence (AI) team would begin publishing research papers. The announcement, made during a presentation via a single slide at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, meant that the tech giant would begin engaging with the rest of the AI research community; a community that has long been combining efforts to further develop AI technology. In fact, for some time Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM – companies that could benefit greatly from artificial intelligence – have all been openly sharing their research in an effort to jointly progress in this nascent industry. And now, less than a month after announcing their new policy, Apple has already published their first research paper, titled "Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training". The paper addresses intelligent image-recognition technology, which involves training machines to recognize objects using computer-generated images.

Healthcare organizations interested in engaging in the world of semantic computing may be able to do with less effort and lower costs as the Machine Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) market grows from $480 million in 2015 to nearly $5.4 billion by 2022. With a predicted compound annual growth rate of 41.2 percent, the MLaaS market may help providers access the natural language processing and artificial intelligence tools becoming increasingly important for advanced big data analytics, risk stratification, consumer engagement, and value-based care. The report by Statistics MRC identifies healthcare as an industry where machine learning is likely to take root, furthered by growing interest in the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the need to drastically improve consumer relationships. Tight organizational budgets and limited talent pools will likely drive providers to engage third-party "as a service" partners across a number of infrastructure areas. Healthcare organizations are likely to look for customized solutions that adhere to the strict privacy and security requirements that structure the healthcare landscape.

When police responded to a home in Bentonville, Ark., one Sunday morning last November, they discovered Victor Collins's dead body in the backyard, floating face up in a hot tub. Police records describe a grim scene: Collins's left eye and lips were dark and swollen, and blood and pink foam appeared to be coming out of his nose. The water inside the spa had turned a dark reddish hue, seemingly discolored by blood, feces and vomit. The resident who had called 911, James A. Bates, told police that he and a few work buddies, including Collins, had stayed up the night before watching football and drinking. Bates agreed to let two of them crash at his house, he told police, then went to bed.

AI has been hot in 2016, and it's not cooling off anytime soon. The investments, acquisitions, trials, reorganizations and breakthroughs of the past year have set the AI industry up to have tremendous impact over the next twelve months. We'll stop talking about far-fetched, man-versus-machine Skynet predictions and instead figure out how to harness AI to turn the slag pile of big data into the orderly summit of our dreams. The hype curve will calm down as people realize what AI can do and is doing, and thus form more realistic pictures of what it will do. We'll embrace AI as critical for our economic productivity.

A teary-eyed Mala Sharma felt vindicated as she stood outside a school for impoverished children in India. A student had snatched the Adobe Systems executive's iPad and had a go with the company's simplest video editing program. He nailed it, creating a quick video that Sharma said amused his teacher and peers. For years, Adobe has been the dominant provider of expensive editing tools to professional content producers. But the recent experience in India with her company's newer, consumer-oriented app showed Sharma firsthand the value of expanding efforts to make tools approachable to anyone. "I stood there with tears in my eyes because I felt like in that minute Adobe touched and changed that child's life," Sharma said.

Ambar presses her hand to her forehead, nose crinkled in concentration as she considers the question on her screen: how many sevens in 91? The ten-year-old has been grappling with it for about a minute when she smiles: "13!". Her tutor responds by posting a large smiley cat picture on her screen – the virtual equivalent of a pat on the back. He is sitting on the other side of the world in an online tutoring centre in India. Ambar, who attends Pakeman primary school in north London, is one of nearly 4,000 primary school children in Britain signed up for weekly one-to-one maths sessions with tutors based in India and Sri Lanka.

In 2016, people have witnessed the digital and physical worlds continuing to merge as everyday objects, commercial and industrial equipment, and entire cities become smart and connected to the cloud. Analysts expect that by 2020 more than 50 billion devices – wearables, store inventory sensors, autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, city infrastructure and more – will be connected to the internet and each other.1 And people's relationship with technology – how it is used, the experiences it enables and what benefits people derive from it – are beginning to shift dramatically. Not since the transition from analog to digital has there been the potential for transformation of this magnitude: Networks are evolving faster than ever to accommodate the intense bandwidth demands created by the ever-growing number of always-on, connected devices to access, analyze and share data in real time. In 2016, Intel has been working with policymakers, the industry and industrial leaders to focus on four areas that will help spur innovation and enable more rapid transformation, leading to greater and new opportunities for industries and consumers: artificial intelligence, 5G networks, automated driving and virtual reality/merged reality.