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Last week I attended IBM (IBM) World of Watson as both a speaker and an attendee, and today as I sit in my neighborhood Starbucks (SBUX) thinking about everything, all I can say is WOW! This was one of the most interesting, inspiring and amazing events I have ever attended. And we are still in the very early stages of Watson, Cognitive and AI. I invite you to follow me as I learn more and write more about the wonderful world of Watson, all the companies that work with it and how it will change our industries, our businesses and our lives. As a wireless analyst and columnist, I come at this world of Watson from the wireless, telecom, internet and television angle.

Andrew Heikkila is a tech enthusiast and writer from Boise, Idaho. More posts by this contributor: Let's start getting excited about robots taking our jobs Let's start getting excited about robots taking our jobs Let's start getting excited about robots taking our jobs Artificial intelligence has fascinated mankind for more than half a century, with the first public mention of computer intelligence recorded during a London lecture by Alan Turing in 1947. More recently, the public has been exposed to headlines that have increasingly contained references to the growing power of AI, whether that's been AlphaGo's defeat of legendary Go player Lee Se-dol, Microsoft's racist AI bot named Tay or any other number of new developments in the machine learning field. Once a plot device for science-fiction tales, AI is becoming real -- and human beings are going to have to define their relationship with it sooner rather than later. Peter Diamandis, co-founder and vice-chairman at Human Longevity, Inc., touches on that relationship in a post he authored on LinkedIn, titled "The next sexual revolution will be digitized."

An Australian man acquitted of killing a woman on a Tinder date has been asked if he is "heartless" in a controversial TV interview. New Zealand woman Warriena Wright fell to her death from Gable Tostee's balcony on Queensland's Gold Coast in 2014. Last month, Mr Tostee was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter. Australia's 60 Minutes programme paid him A$150,000 (£90,000, $115,000) for Sunday's interview, local media said. Mr Tostee and Ms Wright had met through the dating app Tinder.

The Amazon Echo is one of the most popular home bluetooth speaker that lets you play music with voice command and uses Alexa's Voice service. You can ask Alexa for an Uber, set a reminder or alarm, or ask it a question like, "What's the weather?" If you have home automation like a Nest thermostat or a Philips Hue light you can control it with Alexa. At $120 this is one of the best prices we've seen that anyone can get. This has been certified refurbished by Amazon and goes through Amazon's stringent QA and recertification process and is back by a full 1-year warranty same new.

The very first thing you'll want to do with your new Amazon Echo is learn a few basic voice commands. Saying "Alexa: stop!" will immediately cancel whatever activity is going on; to make music louder or quieter, say "Alexa: volume up" or "Alexa: volume down". You can jump to a specific volume level by saying a number from one to 10: "Alexa: volume one" will turn the audio down to a whisper, while "Alexa: mute" will silence the Echo altogether. Once you've got the hang of these, you can start experimenting with more adventurous commands, safe in the knowledge that you can always cancel or silence any unwanted activity. Perhaps you don't like the name Alexa – or perhaps you have a family member of that name and don't want to cause confusion.

Before Amazon's second-generation Fire TV Stick showed up for review, I thought it could be the cheap streaming device to beat. Amazon has claimed a 30 percent performance boost over the original Fire TV Stick, whose biggest problem was sluggishness. Apps took a long time to load, and were prone to bouts of freezing and stuttering. The device didn't seem built to last in an age of increasingly sophisticated streaming apps such as Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. The 2016 Fire TV Stick--still priced at $40--alleviates those issues, but it doesn't completely solve them.

We propose a novel and efficient algorithm for the collaborative preference completion problem, which involves jointly estimating individualized rankings for a set of entities over a shared set of items, based on a limited number of observed affinity values. Our approach exploits the observation that while preferences are often recorded as numerical scores, the predictive quantity of interest is the underlying rankings. Thus, attempts to closely match the recorded scores may lead to overfitting and impair generalization performance. Instead, we propose an estimator that directly fits the underlying preference order, combined with nuclear norm constraints to encourage low--rank parameters. Besides (approximate) correctness of the ranking order, the proposed estimator makes no generative assumption on the numerical scores of the observations. One consequence is that the proposed estimator can fit any consistent partial ranking over a subset of the items represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), generalizing standard techniques that can only fit preference scores. Despite this generality, for supervision representing total or blockwise total orders, the computational complexity of our algorithm is within a $\log$ factor of the standard algorithms for nuclear norm regularization based estimates for matrix completion. We further show promising empirical results for a novel and challenging application of collaboratively ranking of the associations between brain--regions and cognitive neuroscience terms.

Under, behind and inside many of the apps we use every day, a revolution is underway. It's a revolution that started decades ago but today is empowering companies to deliver better, smarter services with greater ease and on broader scales than ever before. At Singularity University's inaugural Global Summit, Neil Jacobstein, chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, provided a primer showing how artificial intelligence literally transforms everything it touches. First of all, it's critical to define the scope of artificial intelligence (AI), which can be categorized into four areas: techniques in pattern recognition, software agency (that is, software that acts like real users), an exponential technology that is accelerating other exponential technologies, and a vision of a future superhuman intelligence (that fortunately hasn't happened yet). Anyone who has seen a science fiction film is likely familiar with this last area, but it's the other three areas where AI is making huge strides at a revolutionary pace.

Are you a heavy user of Amazon's Prime services? Are you ready to jump into 4K streaming? Then the slightly older $99 Amazon Fire TV is probably your best bet. It streams UHD video just as well as the Roku 4, and more or less matches it in terms of content--from the big players, at least. The user interface is slick, and Amazon's Alexa voice assistant can go head to head with Siri.