A judge has granted a partial reprieve to Uber in its high-profile intellectual property lawsuit with Google's self-driving car operation, allowing the ride-hailing company to continue developing its autonomous vehicle technology. The judge, however, has barred an Uber executive accused of stealing trade secrets from Google spin-off Waymo from continuing to work on self-driving cars' radar technology, and has ordered Uber to return downloaded documents to Waymo. The judge also said that evidence indicates that Waymo's intellectual property has "seeped into Uber's own … development efforts" – suggesting that Uber could face a tough battle as the case moves ahead. Google's lawyers were seeking a broader injunction against Uber, which could have significantly impeded the taxi startup's entire self-driving car program, a move that could have been a fatal setback. The partial victory for Uber follows a judge's recommendation that federal prosecutors launch a criminal investigation into the accusations that it stole Waymo's technology.

The data that tracks our behavior feeds into machine-learning algorithms that make judgments about us. When used for advertising, they can reproduce our own prejudiced behavior. Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University, found that Google searches for black-sounding names more often resulted in ads for arrest records compared to searches for white-sounding names, likely a result of the algorithm learning to predict what users are likely to click on. Marketers can also use machine learning to figure out your unique quirks--do you respond better to words or to pictures? Do you make impulsive shopping decisions?--to

Historically, most of the data businesses have analyzed for decision-making has been of the structured variety--easily entered, stored, and queried. In the digital age, that universe of potentially valuable data keeps expanding exponentially. Most of it is unstructured data, coming from a wide variety of sources, from websites to wearable devices. As a recent McKinsey Global Institute report noted: "Much of this newly available data is in the form of clicks, images, text, or signals of various sorts, which is very different than the structured data that can be cleanly placed in rows and columns." At the same time, we have entered an era when machine learning can theoretically find patterns in vast amounts of data to enable enterprises to uncover insights that may not have been visible before.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end.

Microsoft is making some bold promises with Story Remix, its recently announced app for the Windows 10 Fall Creators update. Together with the company's deep learning technology, it can automatically craft your photos and videos into short films. Story Remix resembles Apple Clips and Google's Photo Assistant, but it goes a bit farther with the ability to analyze everything on a pixel level-basis to detect people, objects and the overall setting. If it works as advertised, it could be a transformational app for consumers fed up with their ever-growing libraries of digital media. It's the latest attempt by Microsoft to make your life easier by predicting what you want.

Tech companies and investors have recently been piling money into artificial intelligence--and plenty has been trickling down to chip maker Nvidia. The company's revenues have climbed as it has started making hardware customized for machine-learning algorithms and use cases such as autonomous cars. At the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California, this week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang spoke to MIT Technology Review about how the machine-learning revolution is just starting. Nvidia has benefitted from a rapid explosion of investment in machine learning from tech companies. Can this rapid growth in the use cases for machine learning continue?

Microsoft knows you don't run Windows on all of your gadgets, and it no longer cares. That, above all else, was the message the company conveyed for three whole days at its Build developer conference. Redmond is no longer trying to foist phones on consumers who don't want them. It stopped plugging its ears and pretending Google Docs and Chromebooks aren't a threat. And it won't beg people to throw out all of their devices and buy a dozen new ones so they can live their Best Windows Life.

Twenty years ago IBM's Deep Blue defeated previously unbeaten chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. Its designers tell the BBC how they won and what it means for computing.

Since the days of punch cards, the human-computer interaction landscape has undergone great developments. Scientists are constantly trying to find new ways to bridge the gap between man and machine. The effort has led to the invention of keyboards, mice and touch screens, which made computational power more accessible. Computers themselves have undergone great changes. We gradually moved from mainframe computers to PCs, laptops, smartphones and beyond.

Amazon revealed the Echo Show Tuesday, and with coverage of the Alexa gadget came rumors about Apple's upcoming Siri speaker. Apple employees have been testing the Siri speaker in their homes for several months, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. So far, it's unknown whether Apple's upcoming Siri speaker will come with a built-in display, like Amazon's Echo Show. Marketing chief Phil Schiller said last week in an interview he thinks voice assistant devices are beneficial, but that doesn't mean you'd never want a screen. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously said there's a more than 50 percent chance Apple could announce its Siri speaker at the Worldwide Developers Conference this June.