Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including standouts like Bosch, Harma, Slack, Intel, Amazon Alexa and Samsung. That brings the total number of hiring partners for Udacity to over 30, which means a lot of potential soft landings for graduates of its nanodegree programs. The nanodegree offered by Udacity is its own original form of accreditation, which is based on a truncated field of study that spans months, rather than years, and allows students to direct the pace of their own learning. It also all takes place online, so students can potentially learn from anywhere. For Udacity, hiring partners help prove the value of their program to potential students, as they're effectively votes of confidence made by exactly the kinds of companies where students are looking to get jobs.

On Monday, Microsoft announced a new Microsoft Ventures fund dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) investments, according to TechCrunch. The fund, part of the company's investment arm that launched in May, will back startups developing AI technology and includes Element AI, a Montreal-based incubator that helps other companies embrace AI. The fund further supports Microsoft's focus on AI. The company has been steadily announcing major initiatives in support of the technology. For example, in September, it announced a major restructuring and formed a new group dedicated to AI products.

In the last few years, commercial organizations have relied heavily on immersive technology, effectively transforming operations, and even market competition. The internet makes cross-device integration increasingly common, particularly as more devices become connected. And as it becomes easier to connect with one another, the lines between reality and the digital world are increasingly blurred. Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning were huge buzzwords in 2016, in the coming year we expect to see even more cloud users become accustomed to dealing with bots and synchronize their lives and operations to include digital assistants. Last year, Google and Microsoft added more powerful AI services to their cloud platforms.

That's what I find myself asking my Amazon Echo voice-activated device more often than any other -- not aloud but on the inside, as the comedian Bobby Collins might say, because you don't really want a robotic presence in your house doubting your commitment to your mutual relationship. Alexa, you might know, is the female persona inhabiting the Echo, a Wi-Fi-enabled black cylinder about the size of a Pringles can, which you prime to answer your questions or perform services by invoking her name. I was given a $179 Echo last year as a gift, and a $49 Echo Dot -- a squashed down version endowed with a lousier speaker but equipped with Bluetooth capability -- as another gift for Father's Day. According to Amazon PR, these devices have ranked among the firm's most popular items. With Christmas approaching, Amazon has been pushing the Dot mercilessly as a gift item, even bundling it in six-packs.

When it comes to search, there's Google and there's everyone else -- the company is basically synonymous with searching the internet. But Omnity, a relatively new company from San Francisco, thinks own search that's based on "semantic mapping" offers something that Google can't do. Omnity's trick is that it looks for the connections between documents on the internet based on rare words -- the theory that research that has several of the same rare words will likely be about related topics, even if that research doesn't directly link to or cite each other. Thus far, Omnity has operated primarily by selling enterprise plans to companies and educational institutions. Omnity can search not only all of the public datasets it scans (like patents, scientific, engineering and medical documents, clinical trials, case law, SEC filings and so forth) but also a company's internal documents -- for some companies, Omnity indexes 150 petabytes of data.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. The transportation industry is associated with high maintenance costs, disasters, accidents, injuries and loss of life. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are losing their lives to car accidents and road disasters every year. According to the National Safety Council, 38,300 people were killed and 4.4 million injured on U.S. roads alone in 2015. The related costs -- including medical expenses, wage and productivity losses and property damage -- were estimated at $152 billion.

Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in many areas of our businesses and our lives and is being employed in a range of computing tasks where programming explicit algorithms is infeasible. At Amazon, machine learning has been key to many of our business processes, from recommendations to fraud detection, from inventory levels to book classification to abusive review detection. And there are many more application areas where we use machine learning extensively: search, autonomous drones, robotics in fulfillment centers, text and speech recognitions, etc. Among machine learning algorithms, a class of algorithms called deep learning hascome to represent those algorithms that can absorb huge volumes of data and learn elegant and useful patterns within that data: faces inside photos, the meaning of a text, or the intent of a spoken word. A set of programming models has emerged to help developers define and train AI models with deep learning; along with open source frameworks that put deep learning in the hands of mere mortals.

Is there a next phase for cloud computing? During the past few years, cloud computing has become a mainstream element of modern software solutions just as common as websites or databases. The cloud computing market is a race vastly dominated by four companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with a few other platforms with traction in specific regional markets such as AliCloud in China. In such a consolidated market, it's hard to imagine a technology being disruptive enough to alter the existing dynamics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the type of technology with the potential to not only improve the existing cloud platform incumbents but also power a new generation of cloud computing technologies. The thesis of a new generation of cloud computing platforms might seem ludicrous at first but it also presents a very intriguing argument.

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Microsoft is expanding its real-time Skype translation tool to cover calls made to mobile phones and landlines. The software giant has announced that Windows Insiders -- those who have signed up to access early builds of the Windows operating system -- can now access the new features through the Skype Preview app on Windows 10. Skype Translator was first introduced in English and Spanish back in December2014, and it has since expanded into a number of additional languages, including Mandarin, Italian, Russian, and Arabic. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep-learning to train artificial neural networks, and it should continuously improve as it listens to more conversations. Essentially, it can convert spoken chats in almost real time across nine languages in total, and more than 50 languages in text-based instant messaging.