As government services move online, chatbots may be able to help answer citizen questions. So far, actual government examples are still rare, but speakers at a recent event stressed that the potential use cases are real and widespread. At the DigitalGov University event, "Automatic for the People: AI, Machine Learning and Chatbots for Digital Customer Service in Government" at the General Services Administration headquarters June 28, panelists discussed how advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, including bots, can expand and improve digital customer service. As more people are using government services online -- and asking questions about those services via digital channels -- the number of daily online queries to some agencies have already hit hundreds per day. "What happens when it becomes thousands of questions a day?" Justin Herman, the lead for open government at GSA's Technology Transformation Service, asked.

The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday evening, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry. The 7 May accident occurred in Williston, Florida, after the driver, Joshua Brown, 40, of Ohio put his Model S into Tesla's autopilot mode, which is able to control the car during highway driving. Related: What happens when Tesla's AutoPilot goes wrong: owners post swerving videos Against a bright spring sky, the car's sensors system failed to distinguish a large white 18-wheel truck and trailer crossing the highway, Tesla said. The car attempted to drive full speed under the trailer, "with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S", Tesla said in a blog post. An early May police report in the Levy County Journal said the top of the vehicle "was torn off by the force of the collision".

Tesla announced today that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into a recent fatal crash of a Model S with the company's Autopilot feature activated. The accident took place on May 7th in a small West Florida town called Williston. The Florida Highway Patrol is also conducting its own investigation of the accident, according to a public affairs officer there. The same officer reported that Tesla has, since the fatal accident in May, sent engineers down to Ocala, Florida to assist investigators in accessing data they needed to evaluate the causes of the crash. Tesla offered an account of the event in a blog post titled "A Tragic Loss" that went up today, detailing the crash, an "extremely rare circumstance," which occurred on a divided highway.

The Stanford campus has been buzzing this week over the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which kicked off here yesterday. This three-day event unites an estimated 1,500 entrepreneurs, academics and investors from around the world in a series of talks and panels designed to spark new ideas and partnerships. As part of the summit, Stanford and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are presenting a panel discussion tonight to explore the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Among the featured experts at "The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging Topics and Societal Benefit" will be bioengineer Russ Altman, MD, PhD, faculty director of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, and Fei-Fei Li, PhD, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Earlier this week Altman, who is also a professor of genetics and medicine, provided a sneak peek of some of the things we'll likely hear about tonight: This is a great opportunity for AI to help advance our understanding of health and disease.

FILE - In this Monday, April 25, 2016, file photo, a man sits behind the steering wheel of a Tesla Model S electric car on display at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing. Federal officials say the driver of a Tesla S sports car using the vehicle's "autopilot" automated driving system has been killed in a collision with a truck, the first U.S. self-driving car fatality. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicate the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla at a highway intersection. NHTSA said the Tesla driver died due to injuries sustained in the crash, which took place on May 7 in Williston, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File) FILE - In this Monday, April 25, 2016, file photo, a man sits behind the steering wheel of a Tesla Model S electric car on display at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing. Federal officials say the driver of a Tesla S sports car using the vehicle's "autopilot" automated driving system has been killed in a collision with a truck, the first U.S. self-driving car fatality.

In a keynote talk, Dean outlined the history of machine learning (ML) and neural networks and various ways to programme models to take advantage of raw data coming through in the form of images or audio. He also detailed how ML has taken shape at Google, which recently announced that it will open a machine learning center in Europe. The company developed its own accelerator chips for artificial intelligence it calls tensor processing units (TPUs) after the open source TensorFlow algorithms it released last year.

An eerily lifelike robotic beauty dressed in traditional Chinese style has attracted quite a bit of attention at the 2016 Summer Davos Forum in Tianjin. The robot, named Jia Jia, is the same size as a real person. It has delicate facial features and intricate details. People have even begun calling it by another name, "Robot goddess," Sina reports. Netizens also commented that her profile earns her a high yanzhi (??) -- Chinese internet slang meaning "attractiveness index."

To celebrate the first UK Robotics Week (25 June - 1 July 2016) Plymouth University organises an afternoon of academic presentations, followed by a public exhibition and debate on robotics and artificial intelligence. From 15:00 onwards you are welcome to a series of quick-fire academic presentations on cutting-edge robotics research by the University's research team. At 17:30 there is the opportunity to visit the robotics labs at the University and see robots in action, all while having a drink and chatting to our research team. This will be followed at 19:00 by a public debate on'Robots and Artificial Intelligence: bright future or impending gloom?'. As part of the UK Robotics week, Plymouth University invites you to attend a debate on robotics, artificial intelligence and its impact on society.

In this June 1, 2016 photo, a worker adjusts a welding robot at a subsidiary of China Offshore Oil Engineering Co. Ltd. in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong province. An official survey of Chinese manufacturing release Friday, July 1, 2016, shows that activity was flat in June, signaling further weakness in the world's No. 2 economy as it undergoes a prolonged slowdown.

Last week, the New York Times reported the first successful "limb reanimation" in a person with quadriplegia. Ian Burkhart, 24, had broken his neck as a teen in a diving accident. His spine was damaged at the fifth cervical vertebra, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Using nerve bypass technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles, he has regained control over his right hand and fingers. This is the first time a brain-computer interface has been used to help an individual move his own hands. The research was published in in the journal Nature, and explains how machine learning and MATLAB were used in this project.