ATLANTA – Self-driving vehicles could begin tooling down a bustling Atlanta street full of cars, buses, bicyclists and college students, as the city vies with other communities nationwide to test the emerging technology. Atlanta would become one of the largest urban areas for testing self-driving vehicles if plans come together for a demonstration as early as September. Nationwide, 10 sites were designated last month as "proving grounds" for automated vehicles by the U.S. Department of Transportation. They include North Carolina turnpikes, the eastern Iowa prairie and a Michigan site where World War II bombing aircraft were produced in a factory built by automobile pioneer Henry Ford. Atlanta isn't on the list, but city officials nevertheless hope to make an impact.

In a world of social media users sharing fake news and articles they haven't read--and a president who hates the media--it can pay to go directly to the source. By providing a digital archive of "all statements made in state legislative hearings," Digital Democracy allows people to do just that. The organization provides both videos and transcripts of the hearings -- all on a completely searchable platform. "These data rich transcripts represent an entirely new universe of information previously unavailable to the public," according to Digital Democracy. Right now, transcripts are available only for state legislatures in California (since 2015) and, as of February 6, 2017, New York.

Self-driving vehicles could begin tooling down a bustling Atlanta street full of cars, buses, bicyclists and college students, as the city vies with other communities nationwide to test the emerging technology. Atlanta would become one of the largest urban areas for testing self-driving vehicles if plans come together for a demonstration as early as September. Nationwide, 10 sites were designated last month as'proving grounds' for automated vehicles by the U.S. Department of Transportation. North Avenue is being eyed as a real-world proving ground for self-driving vehicles, one of several communities nationwide vying to be test sites for the emerging technology. They include North Carolina turnpikes, the eastern Iowa prairie and a Michigan site where World War II bombing aircraft were produced in a factory built by automobile pioneer Henry Ford.

If you'll be attending the RSA Conference in February and are looking to learn some hacking tips and tricks, Cylance CEO and President Stuart McClure will be presenting on February 15th at 1:30 PM on Hacking Exposed NextGen. Stuart will demonstrate some live exploits and real-life hacking on everyday technology, and will also show you how to prevent them using simple countermeasures. We urge you to join Stuart for this amazing presentation at the Marriott Marquis in Yerba Buena 5. Reserve your seat today! In the meantime, get ready for RSA by watching Stuart's recent CBS News interview, during which he discusses why "who did the hacking" is a less important question than how to stop it: STUART: "Our approach is really quite different than anything else you'll find out there. We take a purely mathematical approach. We believe that you can actually identify attacks long before they ever start, and truly prevent them. This is done through what we call AI prediction. We've trained computers over millions and millions of files and attacks, to learn exactly what makes them up - the DNA of these attacks. By understanding the DNA mathematically, now we can prevent and protect against future attacks. So it looks like we're predicting attacks, when really, we've just learned through AI machine learning what the DNA of these attacks is. We see ourselves today as applying artificial intelligence to cybersecurity in a truly preventative and predictive way. We see the company expanding far beyond cybersecurity. The techniques that we are using are very applicable to other areas and fields of study. Anything that you want to try and classify effectively. For example, another application might be healthcare, or diagnostics - for example an MRI scan. Being able to detect early forms of cancer or disease. They take large amounts of data that you and I would fall asleep trying to process, and they never forget what they process. And they can learn from that to make decisions going forward."

Mark Cuban, chairman of AXS TV and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, listens to testimony during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing Dec. 7, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images) Add Mark Cuban to the list of tech visionaries exhorting the need to address the advance of robotics and artificial intelligence. "Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it," Cuban posted on Twitter with a link to an essay about the rise of robots in the workplace. Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it. Employment and jobs have been a hot topic recently with President Trump's emphasis on getting U.S. corporations to focus on jobs at home and his plans of tightening of trade and immigration policies to foster job growth. Automakers including Fiat Chrysler, GM and Ford, as well as Intel and Walmart have recently announced plans that the companies say will create new jobs.

Utrip, a Seattle startup that uses machine learning to help travelers plan their trips, just closed a $4 million funding round. Investors in the Series A round include Plug and Play, Tiempo Capital, Acorn Ventures, and executives from companies such as Apple and Costco, participating as angel investors. The cash will go toward Utrip's machine learning and data science operations, which fuel the platform's recommendation engine. "One of the things that our travelers love about Utrip is the depth with which we curate destinations and go beyond those top 10 lists that are available everywhere to offer experiences that are really unique and local and authentic for that destination," said Utrip CEO Gilad Berenstein. "That's one big priority, continuing to build out our machine learning capabilities as well as our human expert network, our chefs, artists, historians, etcetera."

Combining psychometrics and AI can be used to identify and modify people's behaviours. These modifications don't need to be major, a slight uptick in apathy is all that might be required in many cases, especially in elections. It was these small margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that won Trump the election, thanks in part to hyper-targeted advertising from the Trump campaign to particularly disenfranchised groups. There is no question humanity is quickly changing, our relationship with technology has become symbiotic. Sit in a park or on a train, and you'll see the majority staring aimlessly into their phones. In nature, this is known as a mutually beneficial relationship.

How many people could self-driving cars kill before we would no longer tolerate them? This once-hypothetical question is now taking on greater urgency, particularly among policymakers in Washington. The promise of autonomous vehicles is that they will make our roads safer and more efficient, but no technology is without its shortcomings and unintended consequences -- in this instance, potentially fatal consequences. "What if we can build a car that's 10 times as safe, which means 3,500 people die on the roads each year. Would we accept that?" asks John Hanson, a spokesman for the Toyota Research Institute, which is developing the automaker's self-driving technology.

Tax season has arrived, as the Super Bowl recently reminded us: In the first half alone, two commercials encouraged viewers to trust computers to do our taxes, the first from H&R Block with its new partner Watson, and the second from TurboTax with its friendly talking tax bot. Vasant Dhar (@ProfDhar) is a professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at NYU. He is chief editor of the Big Data journal. Machines won't be able to automatically file taxes with the IRS for a few years. But do these commercials signal that robots can come close, requiring fewer human experts, mostly for sanity checks?

Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be harnessed strategically in national building to provide equal access to opportunities to all, Nadan Nilekani, the former chairman of India's Unique ID Authority, said during a conference in Bengaluru on Monday. Failure to do so will invite a backlash, Nilekani warned, as large numbers of people see themselves being left out with the fruits of technological advancement benefiting only a few. "How do we use all this stuff that you guys have built and flip it around to benefit large numbers of people, and I think that is very important," Nilekani said in a discussion with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp, at a conference on Artificial Intelligence organised by the company. "If we don't do that, I think the backlash, as we've seen in the US, is going to be quite a lot." Nilekani wasn't available for a follow-on discussion, but he was probably referring to many more Americans voting for Donald Trump -- helping Trump become their president -- than any pundits had anticipated, as they feared that his opponent Hillary Clinton represented the elite.