Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles has announced that Businesses can apply for a share of up to £25 million to develop, demonstrate and trial technologies for connected and autonomous vehicles in real-world settings. The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) plans to invest up to £25 million in up to 4 pilot schemes for self-driving vehicles. Funding is for pilots of self-driving passenger vehicles which include at least a 6-month trial in a public or semi-controlled setting. Trials should have a clear commercial focus, with potential to become an enduring service, the centre has announced. CCAV was set up by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Transport to help ensure the UK is a world leader in developing and testing connected and autonomous vehicles.

Healthcare is a world of perverse incentives. One person's waste is another person's annual bonus. If you have shares in Novo Nordisk, you don't really want people to eat more fruits and vegetables, because then sales of diabetes meds might drop. The same is true on a larger scale for hospital systems that get paid to conduct tests and perform surgeries instead of keeping people healthy. It doesn't pay--yet--to keep people healthy.

I was recently asked to conduct a 2-hour workshop for the State of California Senior Legislators on the topic of "Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Privacy." Honored by the privilege of offering my perspective on these critical topics, I shared with my home-state legislators how significant opportunities await the state. I reviewed the once-in-a-generation opportunities awaiting the great State of California ("the State"), where decision makers could vastly improve their constituents' quality of life, while creating new sources of value and economic growth. We have historical experiences and references to revisit in discerning what the government can do to nurture our "Analytics Revolution." Notably, the Industrial Revolution, holds many lessons regarding the consequences of late and/or confusing government involvement and guidance (see Figure 1).

Babylon Health founder Ali Parsa presenting the results of his AI-powered medical information software, which took a standard doctor's exam. The lights were dimmed in an auditorium packed with doctors on Wednesday night at London's Royal College of Physicians. They were there to find out how AI might fundamentally change the way they work. On stage Dr. Mobasher Butt, a director at digital healthcare startup Babylon Health, stood before a podium to read out the results of an exam taken by his company's carefully trained AI doctor. The average passmark for the MRCGP exam, which trainee general practitioners take to test their ability to diagnose, has been 72% over the past five years.

Powered by smart machines, the new industrial revolution is changing how manufacturers operate today and plan for the future, influencing a significant transformation in manufacturing, engineering and factory-floor industries. Adding to this, manufacturers are under pressure to meet the demand for faster delivery of new products, coupled with shorter production lifecycles. Organizations are adopting agile, flexible production plant systems and processes to adapt and evolve, so as to remain competitive and profitable. Going forward plants and machines will have to be smarter, better connected, more efficient, flexible, and safe. Over the past several years, innovation frameworks have emerged in industry organizations worldwide, such as Industry 4.0 (Europe), the Industrial Internet Consortium (America), and the Made-in-China initiative, to name a few.

STEPPING OFF THE PLANE in Russia for the first time in 2013, I collided with a wall of blunt language and was intrigued beyond repair. Five years, countless classes and ten visits to Moscow later, I still claim a distinctly below-average capacity for the Russian tongue and its dense, foreboding components. To fill these gaps ahead of my next adventure abroad, I turned to technology. Late last year, Brooklyn's Waverly Labs released the Pilot ($299, waverlylabs.com), These eavesdropping devices use a cloud-based machine learning technology to pipe dozens of different languages into your brain in your mother tongue.

Industry 4.0 is characterized by applying cloud and cognitive computing to current automated and computerized industrial systems resulting in the ability to create smart factories that monitor physical processes, identify issues or optimizations, and perform iterative refinement or proactive maintenance and updates. A recent study was released by Emory University and Presenso called The Future of IIoT Predictive Maintenance. The study is focused on predictive maintenance current state, implementation, resulting impact, and future needs identified within smart factories. Over 100 operations and maintenance professionals across Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific participated. The results showed that while there was good satisfaction with existing predictive maintenance environments, the modeling and machine learning aspects are lagging behind where spreadsheet based statistical modeling has not been replaced by more advanced capabilities.

SAPPHIRE NOW took place on June 5-7 in Orlando with impressive numbers: more than 21,000 attendees from 102 different countries and 1,275 lectures, which was the SAP's main global event at the year. It was 3 days of much learning, where I had an opportunity to attend lectures, several demonstrations of products and applications, and meet interesting people. At the opening keynote of the event, called "The Next Move", SAP CEO Bill McDermott made the main announcements: the launch of SAP C/4 Hana and the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the importance of SAP Leonardo, and also defined and listed what he considered the 10 main characteristics of an intelligent enterprise. McDermott commented on the importance of artificial intelligence to drive economic growth through the use of machines and the judgment of humans. "Great moments are born from great opportunities."

On Tuesday this week, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittees on Research and Technology and Energy invited prominent academics, tech executives, and scientists to talk about the "game-changing" potential and implications of AI, as the hearing charter put it. It touched on a number of topics. Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) sought suggestions from the panel on ways institutions and government might collaborate on AI systems development. And Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX) asked earnestly about the potential for "doomsday" scenarios. "To what extent do you think [is it] something we should be concerned about?" he said.

Researchers might be one step closer to keeping you looking younger for longer thanks to a new study which looks at the gene expression of each individual brain cell during the aging process. Using a fruit fly as the first test subject, the research, which was lead by a scientist called Professor Stein Aerts from the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, saw the team create a "cell atlas" of the brain, which provided insights into the workings of the brain as it ages. The study was published in the scientific journal Cell, and has since been touted as an important first step in the development of techniques that can help us gain a better understanding of human disease development. The scientists used a fruit fly because the insect's brain consists of some 100,000 different cells, and while that makes it much smaller than that of a person's, it contains hundreds of different types of neurons and other cells forming a complex network, much like the human brain. Kristofer Davie, one of the many researchers involved in the effort, explained that it was no easy task mapping the cells on such a small organism as it required zooming in on each and every individual cell.