A bevy of robocar-oriented companies has founded a lobby--a move than provides the single clearest sign that the industry is maturing. The lobby's chief, David Strickland, would like all regulatory decisions to be coordinated by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Strickland sure knows what to do: he's a former administrator of NHTSA--and yet another example of Washington's revolving door. The lobby is called the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, and it includes Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft. It looks as if Google is the prime mover here. Yesterday, at a public hearing that NHTSA held at Stanford University, Google's robocar chief Chris Urmson emphasized the importance of uniform regulations.

Baidu launched a Silicon Valley office to house its Autonomous Driving Unit. The company revealed it aims to hire at least 100 researchers and engineers for the site. On March 15, Baidu's Chief Scientist Andrew Ng revealed that China's leading search engine company is looking into expanding its autonomous car business -- just like Google -- and that it has set its sights on testing its self-driving car in the United States. True to its word, the Chinese company announced on April 22 that it has already formed a self-driving car research, development and testing team, launching its R&D Center in Silicon Valley, very close to Google's office. "Baidu is fully committed to making self-driving cars a reality [...] Baidu's Silicon Valley car team will play a significant role in building the car of the future," Jing Wang said, Baidu's senior vice president and general manager of the Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU).

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

Pretty soon, you'll find Panasonic's range of Hospi robots taking over the simple, but tedious tasks in hospitals. The robots are essentially medicine cabinets on wheels--capable of carrying and moving fragile medicine and equipment. The robot operates using a combination of cameras, WiFi, and pre-programmed maps so it can navigate efficiently around a hospital. It can even access elevators, as long as the elevators are outfitted with the appropriate hands-free components. To secure its contents, an ID security card system is used. According to Panasonic, this is the first time that robots have met the stringent safety standards of hospitals and are set to take over tasks such as delivering medicine and even washing patients' hair.

Like so many organizations today, Infosys, the Indian consulting giant, is a company in transition. For years it has made a good living helping customers manage legacy tools, but CEO Vishal Sikka, who took over 21 months ago saw a shifting landscape and he began implementing new systems immediately. One of those changes involved developing a new artificial intelligence system they have called Mana, which is designed to help customers automate repetitive system maintenance tasks and build knowledge about the underlying systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sikka announced the system this morning at the Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco. Mana involves three main tools: Infosys Information Platform for analytics, Infosys Automation Platform for automating and continuously building knowledge about system maintenance and workflow tasks and Infosys Knowledge Platform, a formal platform for capturing and storing knowledge.

Currently elevators go up and down. In the future, they'll go side to side too; in the near future, in fact. German multinational ThyssenKrupp has unveiled a new ropeless elevator or travellator which can move laterally as well as horizontally at up to 18 metres per second, allowing rapid transportation across large buildings. The absence of rope means multiple elevator boxes can travel in the same shaft, cutting waiting times to 15 seconds. Weight is reduced by 50 per cent, making the system more energy efficient.

Samantha Gilweit, who is used to performing improv comedy in front of large crowds, went with her best opening bit, the one about drunken princesses that never fails. She delivered the punchline, and…dead silence. Her mind raced with how to recover. A second later, smiley-face emoji appeared over the heads of the animated robots and digitally rendered humanoids that stood in for the audience, followed by a gush of hearts. That's how "you knew you were killing it," the 31-year-old said.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Fiddling with your phone while playing with your baby could lead to them growing up with a shorter attention span. That's the warning from a group of psychologists who found toddlers find it hard to focus if their parents or other caregivers are distracted while playing with them. The study is the first to show a direct connection between how long a caregiver looks at an object and how long an infant's attention remains focused on that same object. It may also serve as a warning to many parents who juggle work and childcare by keeping a near constant eye on their phone. 'The ability of children to sustain attention is known as a strong indicator for later success in areas such as language acquisition, problem-solving and other key cognitive development milestones,' said Chen Yu of Indiana University who led the study.

Professor Scherer's team analysed the interviews using computer software that identified both verbal and non-verbal cues. Verbal content, such as mentioning death, repeated references to the past or heavy use of first-person pronouns, such as I, me and myself, were all common in the speech of suicidal patients. But what was surprising to researchers were the nonverbal cues. The found marked differences between the way suicidal and non-suicidal subjects spoke. Suicidal subjects had breathier speech, differences in pitch and other subtle changes in the tenseness or harshness of their voices, the experts wrote in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.