NEW YORK--Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 might have claimed a spot on the tastiest products to consider this holiday season -- but we all know how that one turned out. After receiving high praise during its late-summer debut, the twice-recalled and ultimately discontinued phablet phone had a tendency to catch on fire. Fortunately, the products on this list might be deemed hot for another reason. They've left a (mostly) positive impression these past 12 months. The cameras are excellent, certainly on par with the equally fine iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S7 shooters.

Ritika Gunnar is vice president of offering management, data and analytics at IBM. She has also served as a software engineer and as vice president for information integration and governance in IBM's platform analytics group. In this exclusive interview with SearchCloudApplications, she discusses the evolution of the data science industry and the skills that developers must possess to flourish in a data-driven world. Bringing development and IT ops together can help you address many app deployment challenges. Our expert guide highlights the benefits of a DevOps approach. Explore how you can successfully integrate your teams to improve collaboration, streamline testing, and more.

In recent weeks we've seen incredible action in the intelligent assistant market. Google announcing the Google Assistant and associated devices to take on Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft at Ignite 2016 touting a new and improved Cortana, Salesforce launching Einstein, and Viv -- a start-up by the developers of Siri -- bought by Samsung. These AI-driven enhancements are becoming ubiquitous -- from customer service to marketing, from the home to the car, and from the factory to the community. They all have one thing in common -- they use predictions to deliver results which help you. Predictions are the result of predictive analysis, which, like data science, is red hot in the minds of executives and CMO's.

Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. While AI helps us assess, understand, recognize and decide, blockchains can help us verify, execute and record. While the machine learning methods that are a part of AI help us find opportunity and improve decision making, smart contracts and blockchains can automate verification of the transactional parts of the process. AI and blockchains in that sense are complementary and synergistic.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly creeping into our everyday lives; it is no longer something we associate with solely appearing in sci-fi films. Not only is AI transforming online services, such as Apple Siri voice recognition or Facebook chatbot API for Messenger, but it is also transforming how organisations are using and understanding data to provide customers with personalised experiences. Some companies within the banking, automotive, insurance and telecom industries are already using AI to provide customers with real-life contextual experiences based on data. Swedish retail bank Swedbank has integrated the technology tool Nina, an intelligent virtual assistant, into its customer service strategy. Nina delivers automated customer service via the brand's website in a conversational manner enabling self-service capabilities to Swedbank customers.

Having a smart speaker like Amazon Echo or Google Home in the house can feel like you've stepped into the future. It can also feel creepy. All these impressions coursed through me over the last several days as I tested Echo and Home. I'm still not sure I'd want one in my house, but I can certainly understand their appeal. Home debuted last month as Google's answer to Echo, which Amazon first released two years ago.

Getting your robotic vacuum to clean the house is usually a matter of setting a timer or pressing a start button -- but what if you could just ask it to get to work? If you happen to own an Amazon Echo and a Neato Botvac Connected robot vacuum, now you can. Today the company announced that its Wifi-connected vacuum cleaner will take commands from Amazon Alexa. The feature is extremely straightforward, and features just two commands: start and stop. Users who set up their Botvac with the Amazon Echo will be able to start cleaning with the phrase "Alexa, ask Neato to start cleaning."

Innovative technology has developed to enhance human lives whether that be for better security, organisation, energy usage, entertainment or education, the list goes on. . . One place where all of these prospective improvements come together is in your home. Through the Internet of Things (IoT), developers have sought to make our home lives seamlessly compatible with the technology we use, from coffee machines to highly advanced house-bots. Recently, companies like Google, Apple and Amazon have jostled to become the leader in Smart Home devices, offering Artificially Intelligent, IoT connected products like Echo, Nest and Google Home. According to a survey by Accenture, 69% of homes will be installed with a connected device of some kind by 2019.

A common application of Fuzzy.ai is in powering custom recommendation engines. For many companies, generic solutions don't offer enough flexibility (or require too much work manually setting up links between all of the different products in the catalog), and building a custom recommendation engine from scratch requires way too much time and effort. To show how easily it can be done, we've put together an open source Product Recommendation plugin for Drupal Commerce stores that lets anyone spin up their own product recommendation engine with Fuzzy.ai. When a user is looking at a product page on an online store, the goal of this recommendation agent is to identify the other products in the catalog that might be relevant. The Fuzzy.ai API uses those rules to provide recommendations.

The Amazon Echo is remarkably useful. Alexa, the digital personal assistant within the cylindrical black gadget, plays music, helps with recipes, and orders stuff online. One thing it cannot do, however, is speak Chinese. The name may sound funny to you, but this gadget is no joke. It could introduce millions of people to the power of a voice-activated, cloud-based smart home speaker.