And the venerable Time magazine asked the seminal question in our minds, "Are Computers Already Smarter than Humans"? AI outperformed professional players, most notably in beating a Chinese master at "Go". Real time speech translation is becoming more powerful every day and in next five years, my Spanish would be as good as my Japanese, thanks to the AI and machine learning. These are just a few of the milestones AI reached in 2017. As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt multiple industries -- I think 2018 is going to be transformative.

This year's CES was a great show for robots. "From the latest in self-driving vehicles, smart cities, AI, sports tech, robotics, health and fitness tech and more, the innovation at CES 2018 will further global business and spur new jobs and new markets around the world," said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CTA. Voice control of almost everything from robots to refrigerators was de rigueur. The growing amount of artificial intelligence software and the race between Amazon, Google and their Chinese counterparts Alibaba and Baidu to be the go-to service for integration was on full display. Signs advertised that products worked with Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa or both, or with Duer-OS (Baidu's conversational operating system) but, by the sheer number of products that worked with the Alexa voice assistant, Amazon appeared to dominate.

Silicon Valley tech giants and startups alike have for years been trying to drum up excitement around Internet-connected home appliances. But despite the push from companies like Samsung, Google and Apple, consumer adoption has been slow. Only 7% of households in the Americas were estimated to have connected home tech by the end of 2017, according to research from IHS Markit. Shoppers have had good reasons to avoid smart home gadgets. They're usually more expensive than their "dumb" counterparts, they can be complicated to set up and use, and the true utility they offer can be unclear.

It's difficult to remember now, but there was a moment in early 2016 when many in the tech industry believed chatbots--automated text-based virtual assistants--would be the next big platform. Messaging app Kik staked its company's future on bots and "chatvertising." Startup studio Betaworks launched an accelerator program called Botcamp. And at its 2016 F8 conference, Facebook pitched bots to developers as the best way to connect with 900 million Messenger users. Few expected that voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant would thrive and text-based chatbots would become a punchline.

Qualcomm is about to go in big with the burgeoning smart home scene. As well as its'Smart Audio Platform' CES announcement, which will help to push smart voice assistant technology into an even wider array of speakers, it's also looking to become a smart home hub gatekeeper in its own right. The Home Hub platform from Qualcomm will allow manufacturers to easily integrate the Google Assistant inside any smart device of their choosing. While one new Qualcomm system-on-a-chip focusses on appliances such as ovens and fridges, the second chipset is centered around the new wave of Google Assistant-powered devices that also feature a screen. As well as speakers like the Lenovo Smart Display pictured above, these will also include anything with a display, from thermostats to security systems.

The Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCD has announced a new colloborative research project with Samsung Electronics estimated to be worth approximately €4 million. The Insight Centre for Data Analytics is a joint initiative between researchers at UCD, NUI Galway, UCC, DCU, and other partner institutions. The €75 million Research Centre is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and a wide range of industry partners. The research project is set to centre around artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems, such as recommender systems, play an important role in today's information rich world and in many aspects of our lives.

Apple fans who are worried about the firm's smart devices recording their private conversations may be in for some good news, according to a new find. Experts discovered icons in the latest version of iOS that suggest always-listening microphones on Apple's Homepod speaker can be disabled. The delayed £350 ($349) 'Echo-killer', which will be activated with the words'Hey Siri', is due for release in the next four to six weeks. If confirmed, the microphone mute feature will assuage privacy concerns raised over smart speakers eavesdropping on conversations. Apple fans who are worried about the firm's smart devices recording their private conversations may be in for some good news.

As the tech evolves and seeps into the lives of many, it impacts on how they work and live, with the creation growing stronger. The AI Effect, otherwise known as AI is whatever hasn't been done yet, is well known within the artificial intelligence community. As the tech improves each year, however, what hasn't been done is gradually becoming a smaller pool. It feels like the last three years have been decisive for artificial intelligence. Infrastructure has afforded those working on AI to reach new levels and figure out more complex algorithms.

There will come a day, and probably pretty soon, where pretty much every standalone speaker will have a voice-operated assistant inside of it. In the same way way that most TVs today have integrated "smarts" in the form of streaming apps for video, "smart speakers" will simply be the default, offering streaming audio apps and music at your voice's beck and call. At CES 2018 there were a raft of new models were announced with either Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or a mixture of both. From the JBL Link View to the Polk Command Bar to Klipsch's The One, most audio brands had at least one speaker on display. And the list is only going to grow, and move far beyond traditional audio brands.

Online A/B testing evaluates the impact of a new technology by running it in a real production environment and testing its performance on a subset of the users of the platform. It is a well-known practice to run a preliminary offline evaluation on historical data to iterate faster on new ideas, and to detect poor policies in order to avoid losing money or breaking the system. For such offline evaluations, we are interested in methods that can compute offline an estimate of the potential uplift of performance generated by a new technology. Offline performance can be measured using estimators known as counterfactual or off-policy estimators. Traditional counterfactual estimators, such as capped importance sampling or normalised importance sampling, exhibit unsatisfying bias-variance compromises when experimenting on personalized product recommendation systems. To overcome this issue, we model the bias incurred by these estimators rather than bound it in the worst case, which leads us to propose a new counterfactual estimator. We provide a benchmark of the different estimators showing their correlation with business metrics observed by running online A/B tests on a large-scale commercial recommender system.