Look at just about any rendering or essayistic sketch of the world's transportation future, and you'll notice two things about the cars, trucks, vans, and whatever elses tootling around the roads: They drive themselves and they run on electricity. The funny thing about that pairing is that there's no inherent relationship between a vehicle's ability to drive itself and what it uses to move its wheels. Relying on a battery can actually be problematic for vehicles running piles of computers and sensors, but electric rides are a popular choice for autonomy developers anyway, because they feel more like the future. For Swedish trucking startup Einride, though, the connection between electric and autonomous technology is fundamental. Getting rid of the human, founder and CEO Robert Falck says, makes the formidable challenge of running a truck on batteries far easier.

A 15-year-old Australian has been crowned overall champion at the FAI World Drone Racing Championships in Shenzhen, China.

It was sneakily a big week for driverless cars. Waymo, the Googley guys and gals who are supposed to be winning the self-driving race, officially received the very first California DMV permit to test their vehicles in the state--without a human behind the wheel. The company suggests it will welcome members of the Golden State public into its driverless ... at some point. Meanwhile, Tesla is embroiled in another lawsuit over whether its Autopilot feature is being marketed the right way--that is, as not a driverless feature. Meanwhile, it launched Navigate on Autopilot, a new capability that relies on using Tesla drivers as beta testers.

The Friday event was hosted by the Cabinet Office and others. The hand-shaped robot, developed by Tohoku University, has fingers consisting of small ball-like parts, operated through wires running through its length. The robot, which features enhanced fire resistance, is expected to be useful in the event of a plant fire, according to the university. At the test event Friday, the robot removed gas cylinders and rubble from a fire. The cybersuit, developed by the university and others, is equipped with a camera and a GPS device.

First they took the factory jobs; next, robots are expected to replace mortgage brokers, paralegals, and accountants. It has always been assumed, however, that jobs requiring human interaction would remain safe. Not so, according to one Canadian company, which has automated many management and administrative processes to such an extent that it does not have a human resources department. Klick, a digital agency of 700 people, achieved this with an internal operating system that tracks things like billable hours, workflow and employee attendance, as well as managing recruitment and training. It is one of a growing number of companies automating management.

What is Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT? Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT, and Industrial Internet are used interchangeably when talking about the new era of manufacturing. A digital ecosystem of connected machines, equipment and devices that communicate with one another, this cyber physical system with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication monitors and evaluates the physical processes in a manufacturing facility to ultimately make decentralized decisions. An evolution from Automation & Robotics, Industry 4.0 is the combination of computers and machine learning algorithms that gives equipment the ability to adjust and control processes based on data it collects. This is all done with very little human intervention.

Spotify reached 83 million subscribers. Spotify is giving a Google Home Mini speaker to family plan subscribers for a song – free. The music streaming service said Wednesday it would give master account owners of Premium for Family plans a free speaker that uses the artificial intelligence-infused, voice-driven Google Assistant. Spotify Premium for Family subscribers can have personalized Spotify accounts for up to six family members for $14.99 a month. You can already ask Google Home devices to play music on Spotify, but this deal aims to increase the reach of both the music service and the voice-friendly speakers.

Using a highly sophisticated form of pattern matching, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science are teaching "machines" to detect Medicare fraud. About $19 billion to $65 billion is lost every year because of Medicare fraud, waste, or abuse. Like the proverbial "needle in a haystack," human auditors or investigators have the painstaking task of manually checking thousands of Medicare claims for specific patterns that could indicate foul play or fraudulent behaviors. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, right now fraud enforcement efforts rely heavily on health care professionals coming forward with information about Medicare fraud. "The Effects of Varying Class Distribution on Learner Behavior for Medicare Fraud Detection With Imbalanced Big Data," published in the journal Health Information Science and Systems, uses big data from Medicare Part B and employs advanced data analytics and machine learning to automate the fraud detection process.

What will be the next thing to revolutionize data science in 2019? Reinforcement learning will be the next big thing in data science in 2019. While RL has been around for a long time in academia, it has hardly seen any industry adoption at all. Why? Partly because there have been plenty of low-hanging fruits to pick in predictive analytics, but mostly because of the barriers in implementation, knowledge and available tools. The potential value in using RL in proactive analytics and AI is enormous, but it also demands a greater skillset to master.

This installment of Research for Practice features a curated selection from Alex Ratner and Chris Ré, who provide an overview of recent developments in Knowledge Base Construction (KBC). While knowledge bases have a long history dating to the expert systems of the 1970s, recent advances in machine learning have led to a knowledge base renaissance, with knowledge bases now powering major product functionality including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Wolfram Alpha. Ratner and Re's selections highlight key considerations in the modern KBC process, from interfaces that extract knowledge from domain experts to algorithms and representations that transfer knowledge across tasks.