SILICON CHIPS have lonely lives. They are born together, often as tens of thousands of identical siblings a few millimetres across, on a single wafer the size of an old-fashioned vinyl record. They are then broken from their natal wafers like squares of chocolate from a bar, and packaged individually in plastic and metal. Only after this is a chip reconnected to others of its kind, as the packages are wired up to work together on circuit boards and inserted into products. Many inventors over the years have noted that if chips were instead wired together from the beginning, on the wafer itself, much expense and trouble would be avoided.

The company was among eight Chinese tech firms placed on the U.S. entity list in October amid ongoing trade tensions. The United States alleges the companies have played a role in human rights abuses against Muslim minority groups in China. SenseTime said at the time that it strongly opposed the U.S. ban and would work with relevant authorities to resolve the situation. "We don't comment on market speculation," a SenseTime spokeswoman said. Hong Kong-headquartered SenseTime, which provides technology-based applications including, facial recognition and video analyzing and autonomous driving, says it is valued at more than $7.5 billion.

Most of the roughly 1,400 active volcanoes around the world, including many in the United States, do not have on-site observatories. Lacking ground-level data, scientists are turning to satellites to keep tabs on volcanoes from space. Now using artificial intelligence, scientists have created a new satellite-based method of detecting warning signs of when a volcano is likely to erupt. Gaddes et al. took advantage of satellites that carry instruments equipped to collect imagery using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which can detect centimeter-scale deformations of Earth's surface. Every time one of the satellites passes over a given volcano--typically once every 12 days--it can capture an InSAR image of the volcano from which ground movement away from or toward the satellite can be calculated.

Something you'll hear a lot is that the increasing availability of computing resources has paved the way for important advances in artificial intelligence. With access to powerful cloud computing platforms, AI researchers have been able to train larger neural networks in shorter timespans. This has enabled AI to make inroads in many fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. But what you'll hear less is the darker implications of the current direction of AI research. Currently, advances in AI are mostly tied to scaling deep learning models and creating neural networks with more layers and parameters.

In this series, The Week looks at the ideas and innovations that permanently changed the way we see the world. Artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes referred to as machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence of humans. AI is the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn, so that it can work on its own without being encoded with commands. The term was first coined by American computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955. Human intelligence is "the combination of many diverse abilities", says Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Dakuo Wang is a Research Scientist at IBM Research AI, Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research lies in the intersection between human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI). He is now leading a team of researchers, engineers, and designers to conduct research and design user experience for IBM AutoAI, a solution to automate the end-to-end machine learning pipeline. From studying how users work with various AI systems such as automated machine learning (AutoML/AutoAI), chatbots, and clinical decision support systems (CDSS), he proposes "Human-AI Collaboration" as a new framework to examine and design AI systems to work together with humans. Before joining IBM Research, Dakuo Wang got his Ph.D. and M.S. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California Irvine, a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (M.S.) in Information System from École Centrale d'Électronique Paris, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Beijing University of Technology.

Madison College students Schuyler Bostedt, Garrett Butler and Jonathan Stowell took first place in the Industrial Robotics Competition held during the Wisconsin Manufacturing and Technology Show October 8-10 in Milwaukee. Bostedt, Butler and Stowell are enrolled in the Electromechanical Technology associate degree program. The contest tested robotic programming knowledge by challenging students to complete a set of tasks on a Fanuc education robot in three hours. The objective included program planning, end of arm tool selection, robot programming and teamwork. A panel of experts judged the 23 teams on their ability to complete the assignment, efficiency, teamwork and robotics knowledge.

Waymo One is now one. It's been one year since the self-driving taxi service opened for public (but still very limited) rides in a geofenced part of the Phoenix area. Its fleet of Chrysler Pacifica minivans and other autonomous vehicles just hit more than 100,000 rides. To celebrate, Waymo One is now on the App Store, available for download for any iPhone user. But to actually order and ride the robo-taxis in Arizona, you still have to get on a waitlist.

Waymo One is now one. It's been one year since the self-driving taxi service opened for public (but still very limited) rides in a geofenced part of the Phoenix area. Its fleet of Chrysler Pacifica minivans and other autonomous vehicles just hit more than 100,000 rides. To celebrate, Waymo One is now on the App Store, available for download for any iPhone user. But to actually order and ride the robo-taxis in Arizona, you still have to get on a waitlist.