This Week's Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 24th)

Big Tech's AI Predictions for 2017 Lolita Taub The Huffington Post "For the final Cognitive Business post of the year, I asked artificial intelligence centric Fortune 500 leaders for their 2017 enterprise AI predictions. Microsoft, IBM, Baidu, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, GE, SAS, and Oracle responded. What they had to say is exciting..." Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Make It Easier Than Ever to Fake Images and Video James Vincent The Verge "Smile Vector is just the tip of the iceberg. It's hard to give a comprehensive overview of all the work being done on multimedia manipulation in AI right now, but here are a few examples: creating 3D face models from a single 2D image; changing the facial expressions of a target on video in real time using a human "puppet"; changing the light source and shadows in any picture... live-streaming the presidential debates but making Trump bald..." Artificial Feathers Let Drones Morph Their Wings Like Birds Evan Ackerman IEEE Spectrum "Thanks to overlapping feathers and a joint at the end of the wing, most birds can fold their primary flight feathers back, which significantly reduces the surface area of their wings... These folding wings can vary their surface area by 41 percent. When the wing is completely retracted, lift decreases by 32 percent, and drag decreases by 40 percent, boosting the top speed of the drone from 6.3 meters per second to 7.6 meters per second."