With the progressing year, the technology diversified ways in which we could communicate and retrieve the information from the pocket fitting devices. Technologies such as IoT, automation, and cognitive computing moved beyond the conceptual stages in 2016. As the year takes up, companies throughout the world are developing their business strategies. In order to move forward in the competition, companies are turning towards major investments in technology. The world's biggest consumer technology convention, CES is one of the best places to find a handful of key technologies. CES 2017 finished another spectacular year with pioneering technology trends including smart homes to self-driving cars. This year is assumed to bring transformative technology trends for us to explore and invest in. AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence has been studied for decades and now the vision of transforming insentient objects into intelligence is gradually becoming a reality. AI based Innovations are now pondering into the market and becoming part of our daily lives with quick adaptability. Artificial intelligence assists humans and handles the tasks flawlessly, without interrupting your comfort. Whether to set an alarm, or remind you of something important, or to play your favorite music or to read out general news for you or to find your phone, AI can make the task more convenient and smart. Sit back and relax while you command your device to do things for you.

Y Combinator backed Plasticity is tackling the problem of getting software systems to better understand text, using deep learning models trained to understand what they're reading on Wikipedia articles -- and offering an API for developers to enhance their own interfaces. Specifically they're offering two APIs for developers to build "more robust conversational interfaces", as they put it -- with the aim of becoming a "centralized solution" for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their APIs are due to be switched from private to public beta on Monday. "One thing where we think this is really useful for is conversational interfaces where you want to integrate real world knowledge," says co-founder Alex Sands. "We think it's also really useful when you want to provide instant answers in your application -- whether that's over the entire Internet or over a custom corpus."

Canadian Kaylee Kapital revealed her Tinder date took her to the hospital where he worked -- and even showed her a dead body for kicks. In a video on her YouTube channel, Kapital said she met the man through an app and their first two dates were reasonably normal -- dinner and a movie. But she admitted there were warning signs. She said: "This guy was really weird, I'm a natural redhead and he would always make fun of ginger people." "I should have got a lot of red flags but I was on the rebound after being dumped so I was like I just want to get out there and have fun."

This week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) launched a working group focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning in response to "significant member interest." Make no mistake, AI is quickly coming off the pages of science fiction and being implemented across the marketing, media, and advertising industries. So, what is AI and how exactly can brands make the best use of it? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term for a large number of technologies that can train software to think and learn on its own. That might sound rather lofty, but if you look around in the digital world, low-level AI is already being deployed in things from simple spam filters to the recommendation engines on ecommerce sites.

An advertisement posted on Craigslist on August 9 by a San Francisco couple in their 40s is driving the internet wild. Even though their requirement might read as nothing out of the ordinary – a personal assistant – it is the details that make up for bizarre reading. The couple has listed their profession as biotech executives who lead extremely busy lives. So busy in fact, that they need a full time assistant, who would need to put in 40 hours per week to accomplish tasks such as cleaning up dog vomit and swim across the sea. Some of the problems that the couple seem to facing are: "resorting to unhealthy take-out and processed foods, personal social media accounts are neglected," buying "fresh flowers but don't have time to trim daily and change the water, indoor plants are dying...nail polish gets chipped and remains chipped, investment opportunities go un-researched, and that crucial'date night' consists of collapsing onto the sofa and watching a movie."

The marketing world is buzzing with talk of Artificial Intelligence and one of its friends, Machine Learning. The concept of what defines AI has changed over time, but at the core there has always been the idea of building machines which are capable of thinking like humans. These terms seemingly strike fear into the heart of many a marketer. Is AI just the latest buzzword? Do I actually need to understand it?

Artificial intelligence is transforming our lives at home and at work. At home, you may be one of the 1.8 million people who use Amazon's Alexa to control the lights, unlock your car, and receive the latest stock quotes for the companies in your portfolio. In total, Alexa is touted as having more than 3,000 skills and growing daily. In the workplace, artificial intelligence is evolving into an intelligent assistant to help us work smarter. Artificial intelligence is not the future of the workplace, it is the present and happening today.

You've probably encountered the term "machine learning" more than a few times lately. Often used interchangeably with artificial intelligence, machine learning is in fact a subset of AI, both of which can trace their roots to MIT in the late 1950s. Machine learning is something you probably encounter every day, whether you know it or not. The Siri and Alexa voice assistants, Facebook's and Microsoft's facial recognition, Amazon and Netflix recommendations, the technology that keeps self-driving cars from crashing into things – all are a result of advances in machine learning. While still nowhere near as complex as a human brain, systems based on machine learning have achieved some impressive feats, like defeating human challengers at chess, Jeopardy, Go, and Texas Hold'em.

'How do I control the lights?' is my first, rage-infused question when staying in almost any hotel room. Closely followed by'how do I shut off the air conditioning?' As yet, both questions have gone unanswered. Walls, alas, cannot talk, so I am left to fiddle with the plastic key thing that for some reason also operates the room's electricity, put on an extra layer or six, and grope around in the dark. My ineptitude in the realm of all things practical isn't confined to hotel rooms. I'd also like to be able to schedule car maintenance as and when the bleeping thing on the dashboard lets me know something's up.

Jennifer Zhu Scott is the co-founder and principal of Radian Blockchain Ventures and Radian Partners, focusing on private investment in the Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and renewable energy sectors. Prior, she was head of business development and strategy in APAC for Thomson Reuters and led the firm's speech-to-text, deep search, and video-indexing project. She co-founded one of the first education companies in China and exited before moving to UK as a senior advisor to the education subsidiary of Daily Mail & General Trust. How is Blockchain technology currently applied? First of all, I think we should demystify it. The Blockchain essentially is a decentralised database with a variety of applications, but not universal applications.