DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- Already home to the world's biggest skyscraper, Dubai has another tall order to fill: By 2030, its leader wants 25 percent of all trips on its roads to be done by driverless vehicles. Monday's announcement by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum came without warning and with few details, as is sometimes the case with the many aspirations of the leadership of the United Arab Emirates. In this car-crazed city-state of over 1.5 million registered vehicles, it's not unusual to see Ferraris idling alongside Lamborghinis at traffic lights. And Dubai already is home to a driverless Metro rail system, which carried 178 million riders in 2015. Smart-car technology is being used in some of the world's luxury vehicles, and it is advancing rapidly enough for the plan to become a reality -- or a nightmare for the thousands of taxi drivers who now plying the streets among the sleek skyscrapers in the UAE's commercial capital.

Ubisoft and Patrice Désilets, the creative director of Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2, have reached an agreement that gives Désilets ownership of a mysterious original IP, 1666 Amsterdam. Désilets and Ubisoft have a rocky, winding history: Désilets is recognized as the creator of the studio's most famous franchise, Assassin's Creed, but he left the company in 2010. Désilets joined THQ Montreal in 2011 where he started work on an original franchise that turned out to be 1666 Amsterdam. However, THQ famously went under in 2012 and sold off its assets in January 2013. The Montreal studio -- complete with 1666, Désilets and all -- was picked up by Ubisoft for 2.5 million.

If this year's selection of electable decisionmakers feels like it leaves something to be desired, then here's a story for you. Imagine a world without politicians, or, really, politics. Policy options are instead plugged into a sophisticated program and 1,000 or 100,000 simulations are made. Likely outcomes of the policy change are analyzed and unintended consequences are made visible. Politics are reduced to an argument over what inputs should take precedence in the model, not over what decision to make, and the arguments have to contend with data, which takes precedence over all.

In this special guest feature, Gary Baum, Vice President of Marketing at MyScript, talks about how handwriting recognition is enhancing machine (and human) learning. As an input method, handwriting recognition teaches machines to adapt to the user, adding in another layer to their evolving skill set. Those users can program systems simply by jotting down notes and in turn, build platforms most reflective of the human experience. Gary is a tech industry veteran with more than 20 years of executive marketing and product management experience. At MyScript, he oversees global marketing activities and educational efforts to build MyScript brand awareness and drive technology adoption, expand and commercialize digital ink technology offerings, and nurture strategic collaborations and partnerships within the digital writing ecosystem.

Technology has a long and uneasy relationship with gender and identity. On one hand, technologies like social media allow people to connect across large distances to share their personal stories, build communities and find support. Yet there have also been troubling cases, such as Facebook's'Real Names' policy where users have been locked out of their accounts and left without recourse. As technology gets more complex and ubiquitous, these cases will continue to get worse. Widespread implementation of seemingly "objective" technology means less accessibility for those who do not fit developers' conceptions of an "ideal user" – usually white, male and affluent.

One of the most frustrating elements of the current healthcare environment is the administrative burden of prior authorizations for medications and procedures. It is a frustration for providers, for patients, and for payers. Is there any way to solve this dilemma? For physicians, an estimated 20 hours per week is spent in prior authorization activities, costing an average of 83,000 in excess annual overhead per physician. Is there an actual benefit for this effort? Most physicians say that payers (commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)) use prior authorizations to keep costs down.

When Zinedine Zidane, the then French captain, headbutted Italy's Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final, the clash quickly became one of the most infamous incidents in football history. What was not clear was what sparked the Frenchman's ire – Zidane said his mother had been insulted, a charge that Materazzi vigorously denied. The head-butt got Zidane sent off and Italy won the game. However, had there been technology there to identify what was said, the result could have been very different, Helen Bear believes. "If a machine lip-reader was in existence, the other player [could] have got sent off too so it would have been 10 men against each other in a World Cup final," she argues.

KPMG's recent announcement was particularly noteworthy from my perspective, because it indicated that the audit firm would be deploying IBM's Watson "cognitive computing technology" to KPMG's professional services offerings.--According "One current initiative is focused on employing supervised cognitive capabilities to analyze much larger volumes of structured and unstructured data related to a company's financial information, as auditors'teach' the technology how to fine-tune assessments over time. This enables audit teams to have faster access to increasingly precise measurements that help them analyze anomalies and assess whether additional steps are necessary." IBM is, of course, one of KPMG's biggest software-auditing clients. All of these recent reports mention that the AI technologies currently are being contemplated for use in connection with financial audits.

Computer scientists from MIT and a machine learning startup, PatternEx, have reportedly developed a new system that can correctly detect 85% of cyberattacks using artificial intelligence merged with input from human experts. At the moment, security systems are closely monitored by humans and programmed to pick up on cyberattacks that only follow very specific rules, as such missing any attacks that do not follow those rules. But, there are also systems autonomously run by computers that practice anomaly detection – i.e. the identification of items, events or observations – that do not conform to an expected pattern or other items in a dataset. This method often leads to false positives, meaning that humans doubt the reliability of the system and are forced to go back and check all the results anyway. To improve this, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in collaboration with PatternEx, have developed the AI2 artificial intelligent platform, which merges three different machine learning methods that enable computers to learn unsupervised.

The finance world is cautiously optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence and how it can be used, but, there is more work needed on regulating the technology when it comes to world markets. "Financial institutions have been fined billions of dollars because of illegality and compliance breaches by traders. A logical response by banks is to automate as much decision-making as possible, hence the number of banks enthusiastically embracing AI and automation," said Baker and McKenzie head of financial services regulation Arun Srivastava. "But while conduct risk may be reduced, the unknown risks inherent in aspects of AI have not been eliminated." The law firm's research found more than 400 senior executives working in finance and fintech believe artificial intelligence (AI) will have the most impact on trading, financial analysis and IT over the next three years.