The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the city is testing a "self-driving micro-transit system" with a $100,000 grant awarded by Bloomberg Philanthropies for participating in its 2018 Mayors Challenge.

San Francisco has some of the country's worst traffic. The lights always feel out of sync. The pavement is riddled with potholes. It is, in all, a horrific place to drive. And for the same reasons, it's a tremendous place to teach a car to drive itself.

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become'he said' or'he wrote'. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. These are just a few of the many examples uncovered so far of artificial intelligence (AI) applications systematically discriminating against specific populations. Biased decision-making is hardly unique to AI, but as many researchers have noted1, the growing scope of AI makes it particularly important to address.

The deep sea is a challenging place to study wildlife, but a new foldable robotic grabber may make capturing underwater creatures a bit easier. Many deep sea animals, such as jellyfish and their relatives, have fragile bodies. This means catching them using suction or claw-like grabbers, can cause them to break apart, leaving broken pieces to study instead of whole organisms. To counteract this, Zhi Ern Teoh at Harvard University in Massachusetts and colleagues created a robotic grabber based on a regular dodecahedron – a 3D shape built from 12 pentagons. The grabber is used by attaching it to a remote controlled underwater vehicle or another type of submersible. It starts as a flat base that then gently folds around the animal.

With all the excitement over neural networks and deep-learning techniques, it's easy to imagine that the world of computer science consists of little else. Neural networks, after all, have begun to outperform humans in tasks such as object and face recognition and in games such as chess, Go, and various arcade video games. These networks are based on the way the human brain works. Nothing could have more potential than that, right? An entirely different type of computing has the potential to be significantly more powerful than neural networks and deep learning.

Waldo Photos uses facial recognition technology to identify children at sleep-away camp and send photos of them to their parents. But some privacy advocates say this technology is too new to rush into.

Like many parents in the United States, Rob Glaser has been thinking a lot lately about how to keep his kids from getting shot in school. Specifically, he's been thinking of what he can do that doesn't involve getting into a nasty and endless battle over what he calls "the g-word." It's not that Glaser opposes gun control. A steady Democratic donor, Glaser founded the online streaming giant RealNetworks back in the 1990s as a vehicle for broadcasting left-leaning political views. It's just that any conversation about curbing gun rights in America tends to lead more to gridlock and finger-pointing than it does to action.

Facial recognition tech is becoming more sophisticated, with some firms claiming it can even read our emotions and detect suspicious behaviour. But what implications does this have for privacy and civil liberties? Facial recognition tech has been around for decades, but it has been progressing in leaps and bounds in recent years due to advances in computing vision and artificial intelligence (AI), tech experts say. It is now being used to identify people at borders, unlock smart phones, spot criminals, and authenticate banking transactions. But some tech firms are claiming it can also assess our emotional state.

The tech giants are racing to get digital assistants into our homes - the Amazon Echo Dot currently has a 40% discount during Amazon Prime Day - but debate rages over whether they are suitable for children. There have certainly been teething problems. Toy giant Mattel abandoned its "AI babysitter", Aristotle, last year following privacy concerns. And music streaming service Spotify is currently testing a way of filtering out songs with explicit lyrics following complaints from parents that family-friendly versions of tracks did not play by default when requested on smart speakers. Amazon Echo meanwhile added a feature to encourage children to be more polite to it following concerns that the abrupt way in which people talk to it was teaching children to be rude.

Will artificial intelligences ever be able to match humans in abstract thought, or are they just very fancy number crunchers? Researchers at Google DeepMind are trying to find out by challenging AIs to solve abstract reasoning puzzles similar to those found in IQ tests. If you have ever taken an IQ test, you'll know that one kind of question involves looking at sets of abstract shapes and choosing which should come next in a given the sequence. These puzzles are known as Raven's progressive …