A business leader who refuses to back down, a startup that shakes things up and does stuff differently, a clutch of comfortable tech workers who depart a multi-billion dollar company to do their own thing. This week, we encountered quite a few eccentrics. From California deciding, yeah, it is going to try to control the entire American automobile market from within the fifth largest economy in the world, to Tesla head Elon Musk saying, no, I am not going to let the US Securities and Exchange Commission be the boss of me: This week was about looking at the rest of the world and saying, You know what? Plus, we reviewed the (short) history of the hyperloop, the Department of Transportation's new stance toward self-driving trucks, and why race car drivers (and builders) are secret data nerds. It's been a week--let's get you caught up. The share of the US transportation system currently powered by petroleum fuels, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

A year ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood before the 19th Communist Party Congress and laid out his ambitious plan for China to become a world leader by 2025 in advanced technologies such as robotics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. It was seen as a direct challenge to U.S. leadership in advanced technology. James Lewis, a specialist in China and technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says China recognizes that technological superiority helps give the United States an edge in national security and wants in on it. "The Chinese figured out that technology is the key to wealth and power, and the source of technology is still the West for China," says Lewis. The question is: "How do they get their hands on that Western technology?"

Brandon Alexander would like to introduce you to Angus, the farmer of the future. He's heavyset, weighing in at nearly 1,000 pounds, not to mention a bit slow. But he's strong enough to hoist 800-pound pallets of maturing vegetables and can move them from place to place on his own. Sure, Angus is a robot. But don't hold that against him, even if he looks more like a large tanning bed than C-3PO.

MADRID: Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in Madrid. She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International Conference on Intelligent Robots. Can you please tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the man. She may not understand the conversation, but she's been trained to detect key words and respond to them. A source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable, engineers at the conference said. The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily. In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese ...

Amid the hand-wringing about the rise of nationalism and populism, it's easy to miss that the past two years have also produced surprising and useful shifts in global opinion. Even Donald Trump can be good news for the world. Nowhere is this gestalt shift more evident than in how we approach policy dilemmas related to technology. The idea of "digital" as a magic, untouchable realm that was to bring prosperity to all, one disruption at a time, is now dead. The thorny questions are no longer the prerogative of affluent hippies at Wired magazine or TED talks; instead, they are returning to their original realms of international trade, national economic development and security.

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Computers, relying heavily on deep-learning and newly developed technologies, can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in the data. AI, sometimes referred to as machine learning, is a focal point of recent articles in various periodicals, including "What China Can Teach the U.S. It is thus a very timely topic to be considered in West Virginia because as one author put it: AI "will usher in an era of massive productivity increases but also widespread disruptions in labor markets -and profound sociopsychological effects on people - as artificial intelligence takes over human jobs across all sorts of industries." To their credit, the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative and West Virginia Forward centered at West Virginia University, in collaboration with, and financial support of, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, will host a day-long, invitation-only forum in Charleston on Tuesday, Oct. 9, having as its theme "Focus Forward: Preparing Today for the West Virginia of Tomorrow Understanding the impact of machine learning on people, education, and policy." The first scheduled speaker scheduled is Mark Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon University professor and provost emeritus and global consultant. His topic will be "Understanding Machine Learning from an Economist's Perspective." Dr. Kamlet will be followed by a number of speakers and panelists addressing various relevant aspects of the theme, including a panel on "Skills Machines Cannot Easily Replace." The timeliness and urgency of the Oct. 9 forum are evidenced in a book published last month and titled "AI Super-Powers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order" by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a native of Taiwan, who earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Lee is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the president of Sinovation Ventures' Artificial Intelligence Institute. Altogether, Dr. Lee has been in artificial intelligence research, development, and investment for more than 30 years. While much of Dr. Lee's recent book concerns the relative positions of China and the United States in pushing the envelope in advancing AI technologies and implementations, it also addresses the effects of AI on humans worldwide. Lee concedes that he is frightened by "the real-world demons that could be conjured up by mass employment (resulting from advancements in AI) and the resulting social turmoil." He goes on to say that "the threat to jobs will not discriminate by the color of one's collar, instead striking the highly trained and poorly educated alike .[This]

GE Healthcare has been tapped to build a centralized healthcare "command center" at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, an NHS teaching hospital in the U.K., to direct patient care delivery and allocate resources. The first of its kind in Europe, the center will use artificial intelligence and real-time information and analytics to help anticipate bottlenecks across the 800-bed hospital and recommend actions--streaming data to a wall of screens monitored by up to 20 Bradford staff, as well as to tablets and mobile devices across the building. The project aims to cut waiting times and reduce pressure on staff by reducing the unnecessary time spent in a hospital after a patient is fit to leave, as well as increase the total number of patients treated. In addition, it hopes to increase the number of patients who arrive and are admitted, transferred or discharged from the emergency department within four hours. Bradford's emergency department sees about 125,000 patients each year--up by more than 40% over the past decade, with about 350 to 400 patients a day--and with 96% of the hospital's bed capacity being used on a regular basis.

Imagine a highly banal situation: a busy junction in a major city, vehicles of every color and description, some moving and others waiting for the lights to change. This situation may be boring to death, but fast, powerful computers can view it differently. Once they are "taught" to pick up and distinguish between the most minute details within the larger picture (machine learning, in the professional jargon), they will be able to identify different car models of various colors and issue warnings of irregular events that are about to happen. For example, a man wearing a heavy overcoat when everyone else is wearing short, light garments, or a person under whose clothes a long-bladed knife is protruding, could generate an alert moments before an attack. It is important to understand that machine learning is only one element of the rapidly developing field known as artificial intelligence.

"All you have to do is look at the attacks that have taken place recently--WannaCry, NotPetya and others--and see how quickly the industry and government is coming out and assigning responsibility to nation states such as North Korea, Russia and Iran," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike Inc., a cybersecurity company that has investigated a number of state-sponsored hacks. The White House and other countries took roughly six months to blame North Korea and Russia for the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, respectively, while it took about three years for U.S. authorities to indict a North Korean hacker for the 2014 attack against Sony . Forensic systems are gathering and analyzing vast amounts of data from digital databases and registries to glean clues about an attacker's infrastructure. These clues, which may include obfuscation techniques and domain names used for hacking, can add up to what amounts to a unique footprint, said Chris Bell, chief executive of Diskin Advanced Technologies, a startup that uses machine learning to attribute cyberattacks. Additionally, the increasing amount of data related to cyberattacks--including virus signatures, the time of day the attack took place, IP addresses and domain names--makes it easier for investigators to track organized hacking groups and draw conclusions about them.

Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in Madrid. She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International Conference on Intelligent Robots. Can you please tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the man. She may not understand the conversation, but she's been trained to detect key words and respond to them. A source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable, engineers at the conference said. The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily. In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese psychologist who ...