KAREN Brenchley is a computer scientist with expertise in training artificial intelligence, but this longtime Silicon Valley resident has pangs of anxiety whenever she sees Waymo self-driving cars manoeuvre the streets near her home. The former product manager, who has worked for Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, wonders how engineers could teach the robocars operating on her tree-lined streets to make snap decisions, speed and slow with the flow of traffic and yield to pedestrians coming from the nearby park. She has asked her husband, an award-winning science-fiction author who does not drive, to wear a shiny vest while cycling to ensure autonomous vehicles spot him in a rush of activity. The problem is not that she does not understand the technology. It is that she does, and she knows how flawed nascent technology can be.

When it comes to protecting the growing infrastructure at Polaris Alpha, CISO Eric Schlesinger believes in a people-and-processes approach over a tools-based approach. But five years from now, those priorities will likely shift. "I believe that machine learning and AI are the future to security operations. An'artificial analyst' can replace one or two full-time employees in the long run because it will make decisions based on patterns on the network… and take action for you," Schlesinger says. The company has already invested in several "cutting edge" machine learning security tools in anticipation of these new capabilities, he says.

A lawyer would have to customize the type of information that need to be extracted from scanned documents, and the software will then convert it to searchable text. The software will summarize the extracted documents into a report that can be shared and downloaded in different formats.

Not zeros and ones or binary code--though that's a language, too--but a visual vernacular that helps humans make the connection that, yes, a computer was here and it made its mark. It comes in all forms: the perfect crispness of an illustration drawn on a Wacom pad; the trippy swirls of a Google Deep Dream image; the fuzzy imperfection of an AI-generated font. "We call it the computer accent," said Claire Evans, lead singer of synth pop band YACHT. For their recently released album, Chain Tripping, Evans, her bandmates, and a cast of creative AI experts explored how this so-called computer accent can be used to artistic ends. Sure, this is nothing new--you can't really get more "computer accent" than Kraftwerk (Computer Love was released way back in 1981, to name the most obvious example.)

In the last decade, our data has slowly multiplied exponentially. Enterprises celebrated the Big Data movement as business managers, data scientists and technologists eagerly looked for insights in the data they acquired. Each day, companies, government, private individuals are in a race to acquire even more data. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, acquiring the right data for the right purpose seems to become more urgent. As our data multiply, we are caught in a race to generate insights.

The Trillium Automobile Dealers Association recently hosted its annual Innovation Series conferences for auto dealers, managers, auto students, suppliers and marketing experts. A representative from Microsoft spoke about how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting the auto industry and suggested it could be one of the world's most fundamental pieces of technology in the years ahead. I would agree with that assessment. Already AI has found many useful applications in automobiles, including driving features, cloud services, auto manufacturing and insurance, and driver monitoring. Vehicles today have on-board sensors that alert drivers to potentially dangerous situations.

Ask Google or Siri: "What is Taiwan?" "A state", they will answer, "in East Asia". But earlier in September, it would have been a "province in the People's Republic of China". And Wikipedia had suddenly changed. The edit was reversed, but soon made again. It became an editorial tug of war that - as far as the encyclopedia was concerned - caused the state of Taiwan to constantly blink in and out of existence over the course of a single day.

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup, is expanding to Las Vegas, CTO Jesse Levinson said at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. The startup, which has raised $800 million and has been testing on public roads in San Francisco, said Las Vegas is a target market for its autonomous driving fleet and service. Las Vegas will serve as an anchor market for Zoox. The company plans to test, validate and refine its technology with future plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service there, Levinson said. Zoox received permission from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles in early 2019 to drive autonomously on state roads.

While recent advances in language processing with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) present high-quality translation and classification of the texts, the Holy Grail of the language learning remains missed. That is, while humans appear capable to acquire languages in unsupervised way based on everyday conversations easily, the DNNs require extensive supervised training. Moreover, the humans are capable to acquire explainable and reasonable rules of connecting words into sentences based on grammatical rules and conversational patterns and have the grammatical and semantic categories of words well understood, with all that synonyms and homonyms. On the opposite, the very advanced DNN models remain black boxes not being understandable and inspectable. That is why we are looking for Understandable Language Processing (ULP) which would let acquisition of the language, comprehension of textual communications and production of textual messages in reasonable and transparent way.

While Americans celebrated a long Labor Day weekend, millions of people in China enrolled in a giant experiment in the future of fake video. An app called Zao that can swap a person's face into movie and TV clips, including from Game of Thrones, went viral on Apple's Chinese app store. The app is popular because making and sharing such clips is fun, but some Western observers' thoughts turned to something more sinister. Zao's viral moment was quickly connected with the idea that US politicians are vulnerable to deepfakes, video or audio fabricated using artificial intelligence to show a person doing or saying something they did not do or say. That threat has been promoted by US lawmakers themselves, including at a recent House Intelligence Committee hearing on deepfakes.