On December 10, 2019, Phillip Goter and Joseph Herriges hosted the webinar "Autonomous Vehicles: Technical Advancements and Legal Considerations." If you were not able to attend the webinar, you can find a partial summary of its contents in the Q&A below. Transportation system elements in this context include other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, as well as the vehicle's environment, such as roadway infrastructure, buildings, signs, pavement markings, and weather conditions. The safe operation of an AV requires connectivity between the vehicle and other elements of the transportation system. AVs are enabled by artificial intelligence systems and connectivity.

"What we want is a machine that can learn from experience" There is no doubt that Machine Learning has become one of the most popular topics nowadays. According to a study, Machine Learning Engineer was voted one of the best jobs in the U.S. in 2019. Looking at this trend, we have compiled a list of some of the best (and free) machine learning books that will prove helpful for everyone aspiring to build a career in the field. Even paid books are seldom better. A good introduction to the Maths, and also has practice material in R. Cannot praise this book enough.

This week, nearly every major company developing autonomous vehicles in the U.S. halted testing in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19, which has sickened more than 250,000 people and killed over 10,000 around the world. Still some experts argue pandemics like COVID-19 should hasten the adoption of driverless vehicles for passenger pickup, transportation of goods, and more. Autonomous vehicles still require disinfection -- which companies like Alphabet's Waymo and KiwiBot are conducting manually with sanitation teams -- but in some cases, self-driving cars and delivery robots might minimize the risk of spreading disease. In a climate of social distancing, when on-demand services from Instacart to GrubHub have taken steps to minimize human contact, one factor in driverless cars' favor is that they don't require a potentially sick person behind the wheel. Tellingly, on Monday, when Waymo grounded its commercial robotaxis with human safety drivers, it initially said it would continue to operate the driverless autonomous cars in its fleet.

I feel the need, the need for Maglev speed. The Maglev has been considered the fastest commercial High-Speed Rail (HSR) line and whisks passengers at a breathtaking 267 miles per hour from the Pudong airport to the Longyang station in Shanghai, a distance just shy of 20 miles. Named the Maglev because it uses magnetic levitation, it has been a marvel since it first opened in 2004. There are other high-speed rail lines of a research nature that are faster than the Maglev but holds the top record for a commercial in-use line. Let's call high-speed rail lines a more flavorful name, bullet trains. Of course, a bullet train cannot really go as fast as a bullet (which travels around 1,700 mph), though if you are standing on the sidelines when a bullet train goes past it might seem like it is going over a thousand miles per hour. Those of us in the United States don't have many bullet train choices and the preponderance of bullet trains are found in Europe and Asia. If you hold your breath, you might get a chance to someday ride a bullet train in California. That's actually a funny statement because anyone that lives in California knows that we've been pining away to have a bullet train for quite a long time.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have invented a portable surveillance device powered by machine learning – called FluSense – which can detect coughing and crowd size in real time, then analyze the data to directly monitor flu-like illnesses and influenza trends. The FluSense creators say the new edge-computing platform, envisioned for use in hospitals, healthcare waiting rooms and larger public spaces, may expand the arsenal of health surveillance tools used to forecast seasonal flu and other viral respiratory outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or SARS. Models like these can be lifesavers by directly informing the public health response during a flu epidemic. These data sources can help determine the timing for flu vaccine campaigns, potential travel restrictions, the allocation of medical supplies and more. "This may allow us to predict flu trends in a much more accurate manner," says co-author Tauhidur Rahman, assistant professor of computer and information sciences, who advises Ph.D. student and lead author Forsad Al Hossain.

A new report from Gartner has argued that in the last four years the strongest demand for talent with AI skills has not come from the IT department, but instead from other business units in the organisation. Data from Gartner's Talent Neuron program shows that although the IT department's need for AI talent has tripled between 2015 and 2019, the number of AI jobs posted by IT is still less than half of that stemming from other business units. Peter Krensky, research director at Gartner, said: "High demand and tight labour markets have made candidates with AI skills highly competitive, but hiring techniques and strategies have not kept up. In the recent Gartner AI and Machine Learning Development Strategies Study, respondents ranked "skills of staff" as the No. 1 challenge or barrier to the adoption of AI and machine learning." Sales, marketing, customer service, finance, and R&D are the departments that are recruiting AI talent in large numbers.

These are just a few examples of projects that suffered severe schedule delays and cost overruns, or that were unable to deliver on their promised scope. Planning projects accurately is notoriously difficult, whether they're publicly or privately funded, or in domains like construction, technology, pharma, or infrastructure. According to the 2018 "Pulse of the Profession" study conducted by the Project Management Institute, between 2011 to 2018 only about 50% of projects where completed on time and approximately 55% were within budget. Even though firms have been investing in project management techniques since the 1970s, the accuracy of project plans has not improved much. Inaccurate forecasts involving durations, costs, resources, and benefits are clearly major source of risk for leaders' careers and organizations' growth opportunities.

In these troubling, confusing times, it can be tough to know who to turn to for help. A disembodied robot mouth chanting algorithmically generated Gregorian-style prayers in the voice of Amazon's Kendra. Currently on display at the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris, but coming to the United States in the near future, The Prayer is a robotic installation created by Diemut Strebe, a visiting artist at MIT. Created in conjunction with researchers from CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, it consists of a silicone nose and mouth, assorted robotic servos and motors, and some cutting-edge A.I. neural networks. "For the artwork, we used a neural language model to learn the probability distribution, a mathematical function, over a sequence of words from text corpora," Strebe told Digital Trends. "We assembled a large religious text database of all seven major practiced religions. We merged all [this] data into a kind of'one god or one religion' database. The system infers word meaning and grammar rules from word distribution, by encoding this information in a mathematical structure, which is then utilized to generate natural language. The deep network is fine-tuned on sacred texts. As such, it abstracts key features from this specific genre to generate original prayers, with their peculiar lexicon and syntax."

Video game players have been urged to play at'reasonable times' to avoid putting extra strain on internet networks during the coronavirus outbreak. Social distancing measures to curb the spread of the virus has led to large numbers of people working from home or self-isolating, increasing daytime internet traffic. But gamers have been asked to limit time online during working hours to ensure those in self-isolation trying to get work done aren't affected by slow speeds. The issue could get worse in the UK as schools around the country have been forced to close due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, giving young gamers more time to kill. UK-based video games expert Rik Henderson said people turning to games during isolation was inevitable, as a means of entertainment and social interaction, but he urged players to be aware of going online during working hours. 'While video streaming services, such as Netflix and YouTube, are committed to reducing their digital footprint during the coronavirus crisis, gaming is perhaps the biggest threat to internet bandwidth in the next few months,' he said.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created an AI that listens for coughing and sneezing sounds to estimate what percentage of people in a public space have a respiratory illness. The device, called FluSense, was initially tested over an eight month period in four clinic waiting rooms on the university's campus. In addition to recording'non-speech' audio samples, FluSense is also equipped with a thermal camera to scan for people with elevated temperatures. According to its co-creator, Tauhidur Rahman, the device isn't meant to single out individual cases of illness but capture trends at the population level to see if something is developing that may not yet have been picked up in medical testing. 'I thought if we could capture coughing or sneezing sounds from public spaces where a lot of people naturally congregate, we could utilize this information as a new source of data for predicting epidemiologic trends,' he told UMass Amherst's news blog.