Satellite images, with their zoomed-out view, have a way of reducing the world's features to a series of shapes and lines. In a new project called Land Lines, artists Zach Lieberman and Matt Felsen partnered with Google's Data Arts team to create an interactive platform that lets people explore these shapes with the drag of a finger. Think of Land Lines as reverse Google image search, but for lines. Using computer vision technology, Liberman and co were able to build a tool that matches hand-drawn lines to those found in a database of more than 50,000 Google satellite images. Draw a line on your desktop or phone, and Land Lines will find a landmass, freeway, bridge, river--something--that follows the same contour.

Sure, the California DMV could get its way and successfully kick Uber's self-driving cars off the streets of San Francisco. But if it does, it will be just one small step backward in a year that's been all about robo-rides charging ahead. In the past 12 months, autonomous vehicles have pushed into the public consciousness like never before, thanks to technical advances and pilot projects that have revealed both that these vehicles aren't so far off as many might think, and that their potential to reshape how humans move about. In 2016, Uber welcomed the public into its cars with a (definitely legal) pilot project in Pittsburgh; nuTonomy did the same in Singapore. Google officially launched its self-driving project as a standalone company under the Alphabet umbrella, called Waymo.

Artificial intelligence is hot right now: IBM, Google and Facebook are all competing to push the boundaries of AI, while big agencies like MDC, Huge, GroupM and Team One are rushing out bot services. The global market for smart machines -- hardware or software systems that can accomplish a specific task -- is estimated to increase from $7.4 billion this year to around $15 billion in 2021, at a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent, according to BCC Research. Forrester predicts that insight-driven businesses will pull in around $1.2 trillion in 2020 from over $250 billion last year, while CB Insights' research confirms that funding for AI has been growing. "AI is growing because there are real, legacy business problems that current technologies and processes have been unable to solve for," said Amy Inlow, CMO of AI firm Adgorithms. "One problem in marketing, for example, is the inability to process mass amounts of data and subsequently act on it in real time without relying on a team of marketers to analyze and make decisions."

Honda and Google's parent company, Alphabet, are in formal talks to develop self-driving vehicles, the Japanese carmaker said on Thursday, months after the US firm signed a deal to use its technology in Fiat Chrysler minivans. The prospect of a deal between Honda and Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo, which was spun off from Google earlier this month, is part of attempts by some car manufacturers to address the high cost of developing reliable automation software by teaming up with technology firms rather than going it alone. Honda, however, said any collaboration with Waymo did not mean it was abandoning efforts to develop its own autonomous driving system. While its driverless project has not garnered as much attention as similar plans by bigger firms such as Toyota, Honda unveiled a prototype driverless car in June and has said it hopes to see the fully autonomous vehicle appear on motorways in four years' time. "In addition to these on-going (in-house) efforts, this technical collaboration with Waymo could allow Honda research and development to explore a different technological approach to bring fully self-driving technology to market," Honda said in a statement.

Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa. On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars.

CHICAGO – Honda Motor Co. said Wednesday it is talking to Waymo, the autonomous driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., to try to strike a deal that would put its self-driving technology into some of the Japanese automaker's cars. Both companies stressed that at this point the talks are about research, rather than full-production vehicles. If all goes well, Honda may provide Waymo with vehicles that are modified to run the self-driving system, and those cars would join the existing Waymo fleet currently being tested in four U.S. cities. Discussions with Honda underscore that Waymo wants to develop the brains behind self-driving vehicle technology rather than build the cars that use it. The talks also show that Waymo, the new name of Google's self-driving car project, is eager to work with more car companies as it races to rack up test miles with its autonomous-drive systems and prepare it for commercialization. "For companies like Apple and Google, it makes more sense to supply the technology than to get into the car business, which is capital intensive and highly regulated," said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Cox Automotive's Autotrader.com.

WASHINGTON – Millions of dollars' worth of U.S.-supplied drones that Kiev had hoped would help in its war against Russian-backed separatists have proven ineffective against jamming and hacking, Ukrainian officials say. The 72 Raven RQ-11B Analog mini-drones were so disappointing following their arrival this summer that Natan Chazin, an advisor to Ukraine's military with deep knowledge of the country's drone program, said if it were up to him, he would return them. "From the beginning, it was the wrong decision to use these drones in our (conflict)," Chazin, an adviser to the chief of the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces, told Reuters. The hand-launched Ravens were one of the recent highlights of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, aiming to give Kiev's military portable, light-weight, unarmed surveillance drones that were small enough to be used widely in the field. They are made by AeroVironment.

Honda Motor's research and development subsidiary is in talks to integrate Waymo's self-driving technology with its vehicles, suggesting that working with car makers as a technology partner is key on the agenda of Alphabet's autonomous car unit. A collaboration between the two companies will focus on the integration of Waymo's fully self-driving sensors, software and computing platform into Honda vehicles, the car maker said Wednesday. The Waymo tie-up will "allow Honda R&D to explore a different technological approach to bring fully self-driving technology to market," alongside its own ongoing efforts. "I think these kind of deals between tech and auto giants like Waymo and Honda make sense given the sheer investment required to effectively deliver a fully autonomous car," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "I would expect Apple to participate in a similar manner where they're not delivering the entire car, but the electronics."

Alex Tabarrok draws my attention to an article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It's about machine learning in general, but it starts out with this: Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

The manufacturing hub for the electronics industry, Kunshan, in Jiangsu province, is seeking a drastic reduction in labour costs as it undergoes a makeover after an industrial explosion killed 146 people in 2014. The county, one-seventh the size of neighbouring Shanghai and the mainland's first county to achieve US$4,000 per capita income, was adjudged the best county for its economic performance by Forbes for seven years in a row. However, the blaze, blamed on poor safety standards and haphazard industrialisation, dented Kunshan's pride. More than a year on, the county, which attracts much of its investment from Taiwan, is trying to reinvent its growth strategy. It is accelerating growth by replacing humans with robots and encouraging start-ups.