Poke a hole in a human and something remarkable happens. First of all, you go to jail. Poke a hole in a robot, however, and prepare for a long night of repairs. The machines may be stronger than us, but they're missing out on a vital superpower. Researchers at Belgium's Vrije Universiteit Brussel report this week in Science Robotics that they've developed a squishy, self-healing robot.

Henri Waelbroeck, director of research at machine learning trade execution system Portware, says rather poetically that the system "reads the tea leaves" in market data to distinguish different sorts of orders and execute trades more efficiently. Portware uses artificial intelligence to help traders select the best algorithm for particular market conditions, asset class, broker, venue etc., interacting with the order flow and computing a mind-boggling array of variables in real time. Say you are buying a stock, and you predict there is likely to be more orders hitting the bid side of the spread in the next five minutes, you should be able to operate an efficient algorithm that only posts limit orders and collects the spread as it executes. Using an algorithm that crosses the spread in this instance would be wasteful since you expect order flow to be coming your way. Waelbroeck, formerly a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the National University of Mexico, whose specialisms include genetic algorithms and chaos theory, said: "Just throwing machine learning at problems usually doesn't give a very good answer. You need to have a good analytical understanding of what's going on and this usually gives you a baseline model and then you find opportunities to insert machine learning tactically to exploit opportunities to improve the models."

UAV designs are a perpetual compromise between the ability to fly long distances efficiently with payloads (fixed-wing) and the ability to maneuver, hover, and land easily (rotorcraft). With a very few rather bizarre exceptions, any aircraft that try to offer the best of both worlds end up relatively complicated, inefficient, and expensive. The ideal fantasy UAV would be a fixed-wing aircraft with the magical ability to land on a dime, and a group of researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada have come very close to making that happen, with a little airplane that uses legs and claws to reliably perch on walls. The majority of the perching robots that we've seen are quadrotors. Perching with a quadrotor is significantly easier than perching with a fixed-wing aircraft, because you have many more degrees of control, and you're not obligated to keep the vehicle moving forward all the time.

If there aren't enough examples of a particular accent or vernacular, then these systems may simply fail to understand you (see "AI's Language Problem"). "If you analyze Twitter for people's opinions on a politician and you're not even considering what African-Americans are saying or young adults are saying, that seems problematic," O'Connor says. Solon Barocas, an assistant professor at Cornell and a cofounder of the event, says the field is growing, with more and more researchers exploring the issue of bias in AI systems. Shared Goel, an assistant professor at Stanford University who studies algorithmic fairness and public policy, says the issue is not always straightforward.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

In the mid-1990s, Douglas Eck worked as a database programmer in Albuquerque while moonlighting as a musician. After a day spent writing computer code inside a lab run by the Department of Energy, he would take the stage at a local juke joint, playing what he calls "punk-influenced bluegrass" -- "Johnny Rotten crossed with Johnny Cash." But what he really wanted to do was combine his days and nights, and build machines that could make their own songs. "My only goal in life was to mix A.I. and music," Mr. Eck said. It was a naïve ambition.

A threshold was quietly crossed in the first quarter of 2016. For the first time, mobile carriers reported activating more connected cars than phones. At a vehicle tech demonstration in Manhattan this month, a group of reporters stood around a custom-made, tablet-screened display console as Darrin Shewchuk, a spokesman for Harman International, explained the impending technological revolution. Harman, a company long known for its high-end stereo equipment, is working with Samsung to make sure even more vehicles get connected. "There will be more than 200m connected vehicles on the road around the world by 2020," Shewchuk said, outlining Harman's partnership with Samsung to create a new generation of in-vehicle technology.

They say their decoder significantly outperforms existing approaches. These included a Long Short Term Memory Network, a recurrent neural network, and a feedforward neural network. "For instance, for all of the three brain areas, a Long Short Term Memory Network decoder explained over 40% of the unexplained variance from a Wiener filter," they say. But Glaser and co deliberately reduced the amount of training data they fed to the algorithms and found the neural nets still outperformed the conventional techniques.

Tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, Go, poker. Artificial intelligence rolled over each of these games like a relentless tide. No one expects the robot to win anytime soon. But when it does, it will be a far greater achievement than DeepMind's conquest of Go--and not just because StarCraft is a professional e-sport watched by fans for millions of hours each month. DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind StarCraft, just released the tools to let AI researchers create bots capable of competing in a galactic war against humans.

If there's anything to be said for working at a Silicon Valley tech company, it's the perks. Fridges stuffed with Red Bull. And for select employees at Cruise, General Motors' autonomous driving outfit in San Francisco, rides anywhere in the city, for free, in a self-driving car. Cruise Anywhere, which launched Tuesday, works just like Uber or Lyft: Open the app, type in your location and destination, and wait for your car. It's available to 10 percent of Cruise's 250 employees, between 7 am and 11 pm, and uses the company's fleet of 63 Chevrolet Bolt EVs.