In the future, people - certain people - may be able to download information directly into a device embedded in their skull and linked to their brain. These people will also be capable of improved physical performance, courtesy of pods embedded in their bodies and controlled by a link to the brain that can release chemicals or hormones to enable performance of all kinds of tasks, even in extreme conditions. That's what awaits us as biology and technology blend together, says business software developer MYOB Group in its latest Future of Business report entitled, appropriately, 'The Augmented Human'. MYOB chief technical officer and futurist Simon Raik-Allen says technology will move from mobile, wearable technological devices such as Fitbits to tiny embeddable devices that can provide real-time data or move parts of the body. Artificial intelligence (AI) will enable people to enhance their brain or personality.

What do you get when you cross self-driving artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, and public transportation? Local Motors, a manufacturer known for its focus on open-source vehicle designs, unveiled Olli on Thursday at its new facility in National Harbor, Md., a development just outside Washington D.C. To test Olli, Local Motors plans to offer free rides to the public around the development in what is believed to be the first public trial of a completely self-driving vehicle in the United States, reported The Washington Post. In February, the Netherlands launched a fleet of WEpod driverless buses, which can carry six passengers, on the campus of Wageningen University in a central Dutch agricultural town. Miami-Dade County has bought two Olli shuttles, and Las Vegas has bought one.

Last month Google revealed that it's making its own custom artificial intelligence processing chips. Now it turns out that you may already be using them. The chips are called TPUs, short for Tensor Processing Unit, named for Google's open source AI framework, TensorFlow. Today at the 2016 WIRED Business Conference in New York City, the head of Google's cloud business, Diane Greene, said that Google is already using TPUs in more than 100 projects. These include Android's voice recognition system, the "Smart Reply" feature of its Inbox app, and Google's new cross-application search service Springboard--in short, stuff you may already be using.

Local Motors officially introduced "Olli" -- a self-driving mini bus that incorporates IBM's Watson artificial intelligence (AI) platform to deal with customers. The IBM's AI service will not be used to operate the self-driving car, and will instead answer customer queries about the route and whether they have time to stop for coffee on the way. The self-driving electric vehicle will have the capacity to transport as many as 12 individuals at a time. Local Motors is known for creating the world's first 3D-printed car, and it has collaborated with IBM Corporation (NYSE:IBM) to introduce an equally innovative concept with its latest feature. The company unveiled Olli -- the brainchild of vehicle designer Edgar Sarmiento -- at the launch of its new facility in National Harbor, MD.

Image recognition, determining all the objects within a photo, is something Facebook's AI does with relative ease. The company's approach to machine learning is called deep learning, a popular route to AI also followed by Google and others. Deep learning employs algorithms to recognize patterns, learn from those patterns and complete sophisticated tasks. For Facebook, it could be tagging friends. For Google, it may be creating a program that plays the game Go well enough to beat human champions.

Companies like Clearpath, Fetch, and Locus Robotics are doing some amazing work in order fulfillment and other warehouse tasks by developing mobile platforms that can autonomously and intelligently ferry items between locations. We don't want to minimize how much of a challenge this is, but at the same time, it's only half of the order fulfillment problem (and not the most difficult half). The hard part is getting those robots to pick items from shelves, and apparently it's really hard: Amazon (whose warehouse robots are capable of tranporting items but not picking them) is holding its second Picking Challenge at RoboCup this year, and even with teams of researchers all collaborating on picking tasks with very expensive robots, results have been good but not inspiring. German startup Magazino is another company trying to solve both problems. It has begun deploying a mobile warehouse robot called Toru designed to not only transport items but also pick them (some of them, anyway) directly off of shelves. They haven't completely solved the problem of humans, but it's a step in the right direction.

Google is diving deeper into artificial intelligence, with the company opening a dedicated machine learning research center in its Zurich office, the search company announced on Thursday, June 16. The Google Research Europe center will focus on three areas: Machine intelligence, natural language processing, and understanding and machine perception. The research center aims to deliver machine learning that can be put into practical use, to improve the machine learning infrastructure, and to assist the research community overall. "Google's ongoing research in machine intelligence is what powers many of the products being used by hundreds of millions of people a day -- from Translate to Photo Search to Smart Reply for Inbox," Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research Europe, wrote in the blog post announcing the center. Mogenet noted machine learning software engineers and researchers will be able to develop products and conduct research at the Zurich center, which also holds the largest Google engineering office outside of the US.

I recently attended #alt-ai, a mini conference on Art and MI organized by Gene Kogan and folks at the School for Poetic Computation (sfpc) in New York City. The event took place in a building that was previously occupied by Bell Labs and was the location of 9 evenings almost 50 years ago. The building later became the Westbeth Artist community (home to many influential and successful artists over the years) and is now home to sfpc. The first day started with a gallery opening (about 14 pieces, many shown on Openframe.io) Gene Kogan gave an intro and a bird's eye view of the sudden explosion of interest in this field over the last year.

High-Performance and Tunable Stereo Reconstruction (ICRA '16) In this work, we propose a high-performance and tunable stereo disparity estimation method, with a peak frame-rate of 120Hz (VGA resolution, on a single CPU-thread), that can potentially enable robots to quickly reconstruct their immediate surroundings and maneuver at high-speeds. Published in ICRA '16, Stockholm, Sweden.

Get ready, Washington D.C. residents: A driverless shuttle is hitting the streets. Named Olli, the electric and autonomous shuttle was made by Local Motors -- the creator of the first driveable, 3D-printed car. The shuttle uses IBM's Watson supercomputer so passengers can…