No matter whether you have adopted machine learning technologies and in the grander picture, artificial intelligence, most engineers recognize that a change is coming. It would seem a natural fit to incorporate artificial intelligence into CAD, into our workflows, into our engineering. This not only facilitates our forward growth as engineers, but it gives us the ability to design with complexities never before possible. Remaining at the top of our engineering game is no easy task when the game is constantly innovating with new technologies. To remain relevant as engineers, we must understand – even predict – how machine learning and AI will change the game and adapt before we are left in the dust. AI is the next platform.

Companies such as General Motors Co's (GM.N) Cruise and startup Aurora have said the metric, called disengagements, is not an accurate or relevant way to measure their technical progress, even though it is widely used to do just that. The debate is taking on more importance amid delays in the rollout of self-driving vehicles and concerns over a lack of regulation and the prospects for profitability for the companies that make such vehicles. The focus on disengagements -- when a human driver must take manual control from a self-driving system -- and the backlash from self-driving companies have been growing since the California Department of Motor Vehicles began releasing annual disengagement reports five years ago. California requires all companies testing self-driving vehicles on public roads to submit an annual report on disengagements and what caused them, "written in plain language." In 2018, the companies with the most miles between disengagements were Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Waymo and Cruise.

SalesChoice Inc., an award winning AI SaaS Sales Platform is expanding its USA market coverage as it enters its Scale Up Plans in the Guided Selling and Responsible AI Market place. This is the amazing story of what made a veteran Silicon Valley sales leader join SalesChoice. The global artificial intelligence software market is expected to experience massive growth in the coming years, with revenues increasing from around 9.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 to an expected 118.6 billion by 2025, according to the market research firm Tractica. "We wanted to ensure we recruit only talent that can see beyond where we are today in Sales Enablement and can help guide our customers to a more productive top line revenue growth realization. The reality is B2B Sales Productivity is rapidly declining and CRM systems, have in many cases been empty and unproductive vessels of incomplete or inaccurate data. Our software is uncannily simple where every move you make on opportunities or accounts, determines your odds, like in chess. AI gives Sales professionals an edge that we have never had before, by blending Science and Relationships into a stronger formula that no longer focusses only a segment of sales but on the entire journey. We wanted to go beyond just forecasting or predictions to enable sales teams end-to-end. Accordingly, we had to ensure that we recruited strong sales talent that were passionate about the changes with AI Enablement, and also have been in the trenches in both mid and large enterprises with robust CRM operational experiences and valued fact based leadership, something I deeply learned from my Xerox Leadership experience. We found these leadership skills in Steve Levy who recently joined our Sales and Marketing Leadership Team to advance our USA market coverage in the Silicon Valley," says Dr. Cindy Gordon, CEO and Founder, SalesChoice Inc. Steve Levy, Strategic Advisor and Silicon Valley Scale Up Leader, shares his story: The journey to SalesChoice for me started three decades ago in Redwood City, California.

To map every gene in the human body, scientists around the world collaborated for more than a decade, from 1990 to 2003. Thanks to their work, entire vistas of medicine have opened up, from new diagnoses to drug regimens tailored to an individual's genetic makeup. What if, posits Dorn Cox, a produce farmer in New Hampshire, the same could be done for the world's soil? With detailed knowledge of the nutrients in their soil, farmers could better tend their dirt and significantly reduce negative environmental impacts. For example, they could better learn what to plant and when, or how to maximize soil nutrients and track carbon content (more carbon in the soil means less carbon in the atmosphere).

On Jan. 21, 2019, Michael Casuga drove his new Tesla Model 3 southbound on Santiago Canyon Road, a two-lane highway that twists through hilly woodlands east of Santa Ana. He wasn't alone, in one sense: Tesla's semiautonomous driver-assist system, known as Autopilot -- which can steer, brake and change lanes -- was activated. Suddenly and without warning, Casuga claims in a Superior Court of California lawsuit, Autopilot yanked the car left. The Tesla crossed a double yellow line, and without braking, drove through the oncoming lane and crashed into a ditch, all before Casuga was able to retake control. Tesla confirmed Autopilot was engaged, according to the suit, but said the driver was to blame, not the technology.

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field's most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS. Now the same thing has happened again. More than a dozen AI researchers from African countries have been refused visas to attend this year's NeurIPS, to be held next month in Vancouver. This means an event that shapes the course of a technology with huge economic and social importance will have little input from a major portion of the world. The conference brings together thousands of researchers from top academic institutions and companies, for hundreds of talks, workshops, and side meetings at which new ideas and theories are hashed out. Tejumade Afonja, a master's student from Nigeria who is studying at Saarland University in Germany, posted her rejection letter to Twitter.

A future in which androids look and feel so much like humans that they start to believe they are actually alive - as depicted in the film Blade Runner - may soon be reality. Scientists in Japan have invented a robot that can'feel' pain and is programmed to visibly wince when an electric charge is applied to its synthetic skin. The team from Osaka University is hoping that coding pain sensors into machines will help them develop empathy to human suffering, so they can act as more compassionate companions. For lead researcher Prof Minoru Asada, who is also President of the Robotics Society of Japan, the question of whether robots could one day seem human is almost irrelevant. "In Japan we believe all inanimate objects have a soul, so a metal robot is no different from a human in that respect, there are less boundaries between humans and objects," he said.

The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs. "We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery," says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. "Our approach revealed this amazing molecule which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered." In their new study, the researchers also identified several other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test further. They believe the model could also be used to design new drugs, based on what it has learned about chemical structures that enable drugs to kill bacteria.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is opening up the next phase of technological advances. Riding the AI wave, Google has started six AI-based research projects in India. These projects would focus on addressing social, humanitarian and environmental challenges in sectors such as healthcare, education, disaster prevention and conversation. Google Research India, based in Bengaluru, will provide funding and computational resources besides supporting the efforts with expertise in computer vision, natural language processing, and other deep learning techniques, says Manish Gupta, director of Google Research Team in India. The research team will focus on two pillars: First, advancing fundamental computer science and AI research by building a strong team and partnering with the research community across the country and secondly, applying this research to tackle big problems in fields such as healthcare, agriculture and education while also using it to make apps and services more helpful.

Everyone's trying to get ready for roads that will be filled with more and more self-driving cars. But just as the first cars were imagined to be like horse-drawn carriages without the horses, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a future with self-driving cars won't be that different -- except that we won't have to drive. As a scientist who specializes in imagination and human behavior, it's interesting to me to try to figure out how technology will change our world. It can be challenging to predict how things will change. But one thing that is important to think about is that self-driving vehicles will be able to go places without anybody in them.