Most days, Athena Frederick goes grocery shopping and picks up her grandson from school without ever getting into a car. The same is true of her teenage daughter, who takes herself to and from high school. That's possible because she lives in Peachtree City, Ga., a small town just south of Atlanta that started building a network of paths in 1974 that are accessible to golf carts, but not cars. It now extends more than 100 miles, serving 38,000 residents and their more than 11,000 registered carts. Nearly every destination and domicile in the town is accessible via a class of vehicle most Americans regard as a toy.

Teen scientists use machine learning and neural networks to detect and diagnose diseases, track space debris, design drones and justify conclusions at Intel ISEF 2017. While sentient computer beings like HAL from the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey or Samantha from the 2013 film Her may still be on the distant horizon, some forms of artificial intelligence (AI) are already improving lives. At the 2017 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) – where nearly 1,800 high school students gathered to present original research and compete for more than $4 million in prizes – the next generation of scientists used machine learning and artificial neural networks to find solutions to some of today's most vexing problems. "AI is critical to our future," said Christopher Kang, a budding computer scientist from Richland, Washington, who won an ISEF award in the robotics and intelligent machines category. "Humans have a limit as to how much data we can analyze," he said.