The company raised 1B on Jan. 4, including 500 million from General Motors. SAN FRANCISCO -- Lyft continued a flurry of news Monday with the extension of a program that could add hundreds of thousands of drivers to its ride-hailing service. Lyft said it is expanding its short-term, car-rental service for drivers, Express Drive, to the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Los Angeles this year. It is currently available in Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Lyft President John Zimmer and General Motors President Dan Ammann made the announcement in connection with Fortune's Brainstorm tech conference Monday in Aspen, Colo. In January, GM poured 500 million into Lyft to create an on-demand network of self-driving cars.

The company raised 1B on Jan. 4, including 500 million from General Motors. SAN FRANCISCO -- Lyft continued a flurry of news Monday with the extension of a program that could add hundreds of thousands of drivers to its ride-hailing service. Lyft said it is expanding its short-term, car-rental service for drivers, Express Drive, to the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Los Angeles this year. It is currently available in Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Lyft President John Zimmer and General Motors President Dan Ammann made the announcement before they are to discuss it later today at Fortune's Brainstorm tech conference in Aspen, Colo. In January, GM poured 500 million into Lyft to create an on-demand network of self-driving cars.

Episode Summary: If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, it's not all that novel to be trained in or working on some form of AI; however, to be doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a more rare occurrence. Dr. Lorien Pratt has been working with neural nets and AI applications for many decades, and she does lots of consulting work in implementing these technologies with companies in the Bay area. In this episode, Lorien provides her unique perspective on decades of development and adoption in AI as we ask, where is the traction today in places where it wasn't 5 or 10 years ago? We also discuss where Lorien thinks machine learning applications in business and government seem to be headed in the near term. Recognition in Brief: Lorien Pratt, PhD, is co-founder and chief scientist at Quantellia, a consultant firm for machine learning applications in business and industry.

The move to analogies as teaching methods is a major step in "cognitive computing," which allows computers to learn and even reprogram themselves. Cognitive computing is the big evolutionary step to true artificial intelligence. The new research is being carried out by Northwestern University, using a new approach called the Structure Mapping Engine (SME) which is capable of analogic problem solving, including "moral dilemmas". So far, the results are pretty straightforward -- computers retrieve memories to find analogic situations -- Case A resembles Example C, but not Cases B or D, etc. This type of very basic, very important learning is roughly kindergarten level for humans.

Professor Stephen Hawking says he believes pollution and human "stupidity" remain the biggest threats to mankind, while also expressing his concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The world's leading theoretical physicist argued "we have certainly not become less greedy or less stupid" in our treatment of the environment over the past decade, during an interview on Larry King Now, which is hosted on Ora TV. Professor Hawking said: "Six years ago, I was warning about pollution and overcrowding, they have gotten worse since then. The population has grown by half a billion since our last interview, with no end in sight. "At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.

How Brexit may affect artists and the art market. George Lucas abandons plans for a museum in Chicago. Miami models allege that an artist asked them to do intimate things with a rope. The Chicago Tribune says good riddance. Plus, how the referendum may affect artists.

Long ago I lived in Santa Cruz, California. Almost every morning I would throw on a wet suit, grab my surfboard out of the garage, and head to the rocky cliffs just a few blocks from my house. I would descend a well-worn path to the ocean below, paddle out to the break, and spend hours surrounded by kelp beds and barking sea lions, catching waves, feeling exhilarated, and floating on my board, a world away from the troubles on land. I have a family now and have lived for years in the generally wave-less realms of New York City. But a few months ago I suddenly felt that old hunger again. I wanted to race out to the garage and grab a board.

Today on In Case You Missed It: The Burner chatbot would let a machine ghost on acquaintances you'd rather not text with anymore. But this Dutch inventor should more than switch that around with a small prototype of the ocean fence that is designed to collect ocean trash passively, allowing currents to push plastic and other stuff that doesn't belong in the water into a collection fence. If it all works out, a huge, 60-mile long version of his invention will grace the Pacific Ocean within a few years and hopefully be a solution to solving the Great Pacific garbage patch. If you're into Nerf guns, you must watch this video. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

The Amazon Echo is an unlikely hit. After all, the world's largest online retailer hasn't always won its bets on hardware. And a gadget that relies solely on voice? Yet Amazon has by one estimate sold some 3 million of the squat cylinders since the Echo launched in November, 2014. The company doesn't share sales data, but it did say Alexa, the voice-activated software that powers Echo, is active in millions of places, including smartphone apps and other Amazon gadgets.

Like many autistic children, Julian Brown has trouble reading emotions in people's faces, one of the biggest challenges for people with the neurological disorder. Now the 10-year-old San Jose boy is getting help from'autism glass' -- an experimental device that records and studies faces in real-time and alerts him to the emotions they're expressing. The facial recognition software was developed at Stanford University and runs on Google Glass, a computerised headset with a front-facing camera and a tiny display just above the right eye. Julian Brown has trouble reading emotions in people's faces, one of the biggest challenges for people with the neurological disorder. Now the 10-year-old San Jose boy is getting help from'autism glass' Autism glass records and studies faces in real-time.