In America, 2018 was supposed to be a very big year for self-driving cars. Uber quietly prepped to launch a robo-taxi service. Waymo said riders would be able to catch a driverless ride by year's end. General Motors' Cruise said it would start testing in New York City, the country's traffic chaos capital. Congress was poised to pass legislation that would set broad outlines for federal regulation of the tech.

Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. He also loved to travel. Less than a month after they met, Ho surprised Chang by buying a plane ticket to meet her in Taiwan, where she'd temporarily relocated.

As helicopter flights go, this one was especially boring. We took off, hovered for a bit, and maneuvered around the airport. We flew to a spot about 10 miles away, did some turns and gentle banks, then came back and landed. I've been on more exciting ferris wheels, with views more inspiring than those of rural Connecticut. Still, the flight was impressive for at least one reason: The pilot controlling the 12,000-pound Sikorsky S-76 had never before operated a helicopter.

By no means am I a master, but on my 23rd try, I created the perfect conditions to eradicate the human race. First I zombified humans; another time, apes contracted the simian flu and gained self-awareness. On the 23rd attempt, I went old school with a simple germ. I even gave this ultimate pathogen a name. As Bob spread from person to person, red dots cropped up all over the world map.

IBM has come up with a way to use quantum computers to improve machine learning algorithms, even though we don't have anything approaching a quantum computer yet. The tech giant developed and tested a quantum algorithm for machine learning with scientists from Oxford University and MIT, showing how quantum computers will be able to map data at a far more sophisticated level than any classical computer. Somewhat ironically, the testing was done using modelling of only two qubits simulated on a classical computer, because that's the current hardware capability available. There are no quantum computers because qubits can't stay in an entangled state for more than a few hundred microseconds, even in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. They break down into decoherence and can no longer be used to perform calculations in parallel, the feature of quantum computing that will give it awesome processing power.

Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time testing potential drugs, and they end up wasting much of that effort on candidates that don't pan out. Kyle Swanson wants to change that. A master's student in computer science and engineering, Swanson is working on a project that involves feeding a computer information about chemical compounds that have or have not worked as drugs in the past. From this input, the machine "learns" to predict which kinds of new compounds have the most promise as drug candidates, potentially saving money and time otherwise spent on testing. Several prominent companies have already adopted the software as their new model.

Enterprise security has always been a cat and mouse game, with cyber adversaries constantly evolving their attack systems to get past defenses. Can AI based systems help in warding off new age threats and zero day attacks. To get a perspective, we spoke with Vikas Arora, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software Leader, IBM India/South Asia, who shares his view on how AI can impact enterprise security. What are your views on the cyber security landscape in India? Which sectors do you think are the most vulnerable today?

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI officially launched today. Stanford HAI seeks to become an interdisciplinary global AI hub and to fundamentally change the field of AI by integrating a wide range of disciplines and prioritizing true diversity of thought. Researchers in Korea analyzed literature evaluating 516 AI algorithms for medical image analysis and found that only 6% validated their AI and 0% were ready for clinical use. This lack of appropriate clinical validation is referred to as digital exceptionalism. An analysis of 47 biomedical unicorns found that most of the highest valued startups in healthcare have a limited or non‐existent participation in the publicly available scientific literature.

Coffee cups are being grown from fruit by a design company in a bid to cut down on plastic waste. They are made from gourds, a large fruit with a hard skin in the pumpkin family, using custom-designed 3D-printed moulds. The company claims that these biodegradable cups can be manufactured on a mass scale – offering a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper coffee cups. Gourds are fast-growing plants that bear strong fruit each season. Once dried, the gourds' strong outer skin and fibrous inner flesh becomes watertight.

A unit of the U.S. Department of Commerce has been using photos of immigrants, abused children and dead people to train their facial recognition systems, a worrying new report has detailed. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) oversees a database, called the Facial Recognition Verification Testing program, that'depends' on these types of controversial images, according to Slate. Scientists from Dartmouth College, the University of Washington and Arizona State University discovered the practice and laid out their findings in new research set to be reviewed for publication later this year. A unit of the U.S. Department of Commerce has been using photos of immigrants, abused children and dead people to train their facial recognition systems, a new report has detailed. The Facial Recognition Verification Testing program was first established in 2017 as a way for companies, academic researchers and designers to evaluate their facial recognition technologies.