The common, and recurring, view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be before they walk among us? The new White House report on artificial intelligence takes an appropriately skeptical view of that dream. It says the next 20 years likely won't see machines "exhibit broadly-applicable intelligence comparable to or exceeding that of humans," though it does go on to say that in the coming years, "machines will reach and exceed human performance on more and more tasks."

Google's DeepMind AI Research News & Update: Company Works With Blizzard To Use'Starcraft ... Artificial Intelligence Could Not Replace CEOs...Yet, Study Says Back to the Future 2.1 – Will Amazon Echo & Google Home play a big part in lives in 2017? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

It's hard to believe that Black Friday and the 2016 holiday shopping season are almost here. The good news for those of us shopping for personal consumer electronics and tech gadgets for friends and family this holiday season is that there are some real bargains. Tech innovation has improved dramatically over the last year and because of competition the pricing has come down significantly. This year, I've structured the holiday tech gift guide a little differently. I had the opportunity to review many products this year, but I've narrowed the guide down to my top 30 featured products -- from tablets and phones to cameras and drones. I'm also putting together a future gift guide of less costly tech items in categories like kids, health/fitness, home/security and audio so be on the lookout for that. Always remember to check online for the lowest current prices on these items as most will be discounted as we get closer to the holidays. Remember, Hanukkah begins on the evening of December 24 this year. The Surface Pro 4 is the perfect holiday gift for a loved one looking for a device for work or play -- especially for the student who doesn't want to schlep around a heavy computer laptop. Powered by an Intel Core processor, it offers up to nine hours of battery life. Paired with the $60 Surface Pen you can use it for detailed sketches and handwritten notes.

Seagate on Monday launched its ClusterStor 300N storage system that's designed for high performance computing and applications such as seismic processing, financial modeling, machine learning and fluid dynamics. The ClusterStor 300N combines Seagate's management software, called Nytro Intelligent I/O Manager, an a flash cache accelerator. Here's the upshot: Seagate and other storage companies are all gunning for high performance computing (HPC) sales because those systems are increasingly going mainstream. Enterprises are using HPC for more big data and analytics workloads. The catch is that enterprises need HPC applications, but are also trying to save costs.

Amazon has brought its on-demand music service to the UK, with the company hoping its machine learning-powered Alexa service will give it an edge over its more established rivals like Apple Music and Spotify. Amazon Music Unlimited is Amazon's attempt to break into the music subscription market. The company claims a catalogue of "over 40 million songs" plus thousands of hand-curated playlists. The service is priced at £7.99 a month or £79 a year for Amazon Prime customers, and £9.99 for non-members. Amazon's Alexa line of products will soon get new home automation skills thanks to the release of an API by the company. Amazon's Echo device launched in the UK in September, and is likely to be key to the success of the music service.

Samsung Electronics wants to buy its way into the connected car market, with a plan to acquire Harman for US$8 billion. It's the latest in a line of acquisitions by Samsung, as it seeks to diversify its business beyond the slowing smartphone market. Other recently announced deals include last month's buy of artificial intelligence startup Viv Labs, which has developed a virtual personal assistant Samsung hopes to put in its consumer electronics products, and the June purchase of Joyent, a supplier of cloud services for the internet of things. Samsung only set up its automotive electronics team last December, with the goal of identifying business opportunities in the sector, and where previous acquisitions have been unabashedly about enhancing or adding capabilities to existing Samsung products, the strategy with Harman seems to be more about buying a position in a new market. Harman's best-known products are probably the headphones, Bluetooth speakers and home hi-fi systems it sells under brands such as JBL, AKG and Harman Kardon, but it makes around two-thirds of its revenue from audio electronics.

Facebook's deep-learning artificial intelligence systems have learned to recognize your friends in your photos, and Google's AI has learned to anticipate what you'll be searching for. But there's no need to feel left out, even if your company's computers haven't learned much lately. A growing number of tech giants and startups have begun offering machine learning as a cloud service. That means other companies and startups do not need to develop their own specialized hardware or software to apply deep learning--the high-powered version du jour of machine learning--to their specific business needs. "Deep-learning algorithms dominate other machine-learning methods when data sets are large," says Zachary Chase Lipton, a deep-learning researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Group at the University of California, San Diego, who has examined cloud AI services from companies such as Amazon and IBM.

Data is everywhere – masses of it. And it's helping businesses to make better decisions across departments. Marketing can utilise data to discover the effectiveness of email campaigns, finance can analyse past trends to make predictions and projections for the future, and sales can target their follow-up with detailed information on prospective customers. But data is only useful when business tools transform it into valuable information. Data intelligence through algorithms and analytics make business data relatable. The most advanced solutions require enormous amounts of data to be able to offer accurate insight to users.

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. More posts by this contributor: Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence Computers and mobile devices running rich operating systems have a plethora of security solutions and encryption protocols that can protect them against the multitude of threats they face as soon as they become connected to the Internet. Such is not the case with IoT. Of the billions of IoT devices presently in use, a considerable percentage are sporting low-end processing power and storage capacity and don't have the capability to become extended with security solutions. Yet they are connected to the Internet, nonetheless, which is an extremely hostile environment.