A year ago, I wrote that I had seen the future. I had attended the IBM Insights conference in Las Vegas, an entire conference devoted to the Internet of Things, analytics, cognitive marketing, and related topics. And if the concept of Moore's Law (that technology doubles every year, or every 18 months or two years, depending on what you read) holds true, then a lot has happened since then. While last year's future is now a history lesson, what is currently happening in the World of Watson is moving at warp speed! This past week more than 17,000 people attended IBM's World of Watson, the new name of the conference devoted to cognitive technology. Fifteen "influencers" were invited to attend IBM's first-ever Cognitive College that included product demonstrations and lectures about how Watson's cognitive abilities are impacting marketing and commerce.

The next flagship phone from Samsung, the Galaxy S8, is expected to arrive early next year with a major new feature: a built-in intelligent digital assistant. The artificial intelligence will be made possible by Samsung's acquisition of Viv Labs, which was announced last month. Founded by two of the creators of Siri, Apple's signature digital assistant, Viv Labs said its technology represents a "new paradigm" for how people interact with computers. The Viv AI uses something called dynamic program generation that creates software on the fly based on the intent of the request given to it. In a briefing reported yesterday by Reuters, Samsung said the addition of Viv's technology to the Galaxy S8 will enable a wide variety of new services for its customers.

Recently we wrote about how the'popular' Watson of Jeopardy fame still lingers in the memories of our non-data scientist colleagues and perhaps misleads them about the capabilities of AI. It's time we got in tune with the modern Watson, or more correctly IBM's Watson Group and its Watson platform and took a look at all there is to offer. There are three broad capabilities in today's AI and they are: Image and video processing: Largely driven by Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) this field has been getting most of the press with capabilities like facial and object recognition. Text and speech processing: This is generally known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), the capability to not only intake speech and text but to understand the nuanced context of strings of words, to perform search or translation on them, and output words and blocks of text and speech. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana represent examples of this field that used to be the butt of jokes but are now more than commercially acceptable. This field has been largely driven by Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs).

There are now a wide variety of chatbots. You can now order a pizza with a bot. You can plan a weekend getaway with a bot. You can even play Pokémon GO, without playing Pokémon GO, with a bot. The world's big tech companies all agree that conversational interfaces are the next big thing.

Popular dating app Tinder is rolling out a new update that allows people to choose their gender beyond just the binary options of male and female. In a blog post Tuesday, the company said: "Starting today, no matter how you identify, you can express your authentic self on Tinder." Users who want to use this option can go do so by updating their profile, which now has a "More" button under the "I Am" option. Choosing "More" will allow you to type the descriptor that best fits your gender identity. You can also choose to display your gender in your profile as well as appear in searches specific to your gender identity.

A man uses the dating app Tinder in New Delhi in 2015. A man uses the dating app Tinder in New Delhi in 2015. The dating app Tinder has made a change that it hopes will make the experience more inclusive for transgender and gender non-conforming people. Previously, users had to identify either as a man or a woman. Now, the company says people can now select a gender description from a much wider array of options.

The online retailer plans to add deals every five minutes from now until December 22nd. Amazon, the sleeping giant as other retailers unveiled their Black Friday plans, is back with a vengeance, rolling out a slew of rock-bottom deals on television sets. While not every deal has been detailed, the company has put out a list of some items customers can expect to see discounted at various points over the 35 days. Other deals include a Denon Heos 1 speaker for $99.99 and Sennheiser's HD 598 Cs Closed Back Headphones for $99.95, both roughly $100 off. Hyundai is how owners can now use Amazon's Echo home connectivity system in conjunction with their cars (Photo: Hyundai) As has already been seen at other retailers, Amazon will be giving its own devices some hefty discounts.

Embeddings are ubiquitous in machine learning, appearing in recommender systems, NLP, and many other applications. Researchers and developers often need to explore the properties of a specific embedding, and one way to analyze embeddings is to visualize them. We present the Embedding Projector, a tool for interactive visualization and interpretation of embeddings.

Sundar Pichai is huddling with five Google staffers in a room next to his office that's known--appropriately enough--as "Sundar's Huddle." The employees are members of the Google Photos team, and they're here this morning to update Pichai on something they've been working on for months. The group has barely begun its presentation when Pichai starts peppering them with questions, opinions, and advice. For half an hour, the discussion careens from subject to subject: the power of artificial intelligence, the value of integrating Google Photos with other products such as Google Drive, the importance of creating an emotional bond with the users of an app. After the team shows Pichai a rough cut of a promotional video, his feedback is unguarded and heartfelt: "That's awesome!" Google's bearded, 44-year-old CEO is, unmistakably, in his element. "Nothing makes me happier than a product review in which I can sit with the team and they're showing me something they're building," Pichai had told me a few days earlier. "Being able to react to it and think through, 'When users get this, what will their feedback be?' I'm always on a quest to do that better and do more of it."

A startup that originally launched as an AI-powered virtual assistant, Mezi, has pivoted to focus on travel only. There's little to do online that's more annoying than booking flights, hotels and everything else you need just to take a break, or be somewhere for work. Mezi's newly designed app allows users to find and book flights and hotels and make restaurant reservations wherever they want to travel by simply typing a bit about what they're looking for into a messaging-style interface, or chatbot. Rather than relying on AI from the likes of IBM Watson or other providers, Mezi has built its own deep learning and natural language processing systems to make its app able to converse with users, and to filter out three options that meet their needs each time they make a request. Travel apps, from big players like Kayak and Google to growing startups like Hitlist or Skyscanner, already help users plan trips or find great deals on flights, hotels and more.