Tesla Motors Inc. is accusing the former director of its Autopilot program and the former tech guru behind Google's self-driving car of improperly recruiting the auto maker's engineers to create their own autonomous-car startup. The allegations raised in a lawsuit filed Thursday in California state court in Santa Clara are sure to rock the nascent self-driving car industry that is racing to put automated vehicles on the roadways in...

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's choice for labor secretary is CEO of a fast food empire that is outsourcing jobs, a stark contrast with Trump's scathing attacks on companies that send jobs overseas. A filing with the Department of Labor and Trump's criticism of outsourcing could be raised at Andrew Puzder's confirmation hearing, with Democrats questioning how well he can advocate for workers. Puzder's company, CKE Restaurants Inc., notified the government in August of 2010 that it was outsourcing its restaurant information technology division to the Philippines. Doing so, the agency found, "contributed importantly" to the layoffs of both CKE employees and those of an outside staffing firm at an Anaheim, California, facility. The agency's finding made workers eligible for federally funded benefits meant to dampen the impact of globalization on employees. "By outsourcing the function to a firm that employs hundreds of Help Desk specialists, CKE was able to improve the quality of service levels to their restaurants," the company said in a statement Wednesday to The Associated Press.

For many, the holiday season is a time of reflection, both from a personal and professional standpoint. I won't get too deep into politics and pop culture, but can't reflect on 2016 without thinking about the 2016 US presidential election and the Chicago Cub's finally winning the world series after 108 years. In my professional life I recall the challenges faced and overcome, the triumphs and even missed opportunities. Hopefully there were more triumphs than missed opportunities in your professional life, but reflecting on both can help prepare and potentially create your own opportunities in the new year – particularly if you work in digital commerce. If you're a digital commerce professional, either an online retailer or a B2B seller, last year saw a few milestones that are sure to impact your business in 2017 and beyond.

A week hasn't even passed since the inauguration, but television news is saturated with the flurry of activity from President Donald Trump's administration. Trump, via Twitter, promised to launch an investigation into illegal voting and threatened to "send in the Feds" if Chicago police can't fix the "carnage." And that was just between Tuesday and Wednesday. This heightened scrutiny compelled the Internet Archive, a repository of everything posted on the web, to launch its Trump Archive in early January. You, perhaps, digitally time-traveled with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, or checked out free books, movies and software.

Medical diagnosis has been identified as one of the areas where artificial intelligence and machine learning could have most impact – but how should the NHS proceed? The likes of University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Free NHS Trust and Moorfields Eye Hospital have teamed up with Google DeepMind to work on better patient outcomes for those suffering from certain cancers, or for those who have had sight loss. According to Orlando Agrippa, deputy CIO at Barts Health NHS Trust, the NHS could benefit tenfold if it leveraged AI. "It could be used to increase accuracy over things like prescriptions, interventions and early diagnosis," he told BusinessCloud. The Commons Science and Technology Committee suggested last year that supercomputers assisting doctors with medical diagnoses could be one of the key impact areas of AI, but that government leadership in the fields of robotics and AI had been lacking.

The 1556 earthquake that killed an estimated 830,000 people in the Shaanxi Province is but the deadliest example of China's long history with the natural disaster. The 1920 Haiyuan quake killed 273,000; the 1976 Tangshan earthquake claimed about 232,000 lives. Whether or not they hold to the historic view that earthquakes indicate heaven's displeasure, the modern Chinese aren't sitting idle as the ground trembles. Starting in the mid-1960s, the country established a system to improve prediction capabilities, response training, and public communications to reduce the impact of calamities. They enlisted satellites to shape post-disaster responses, but since quakes have a habit of knocking out the ground-based systems that deliver their images to those who need them, a view from space isn't always much help.

When people hear about artificial intelligence, they have one of two responses: they are terrified of a Skynet dystopia, or they are excited for the new possibilities afforded by machine learning and robotics. While 2017 will not be the year that humanoid, Westworld-esque robots work alongside us or take over all of our jobs, we will definitely be seeing an even smarter circulation of "alternative facts". We will see greater capabilities from AI in facilitating business processes such as services, software delivery and IT infrastructure changes. Google has built a hub for chatbots to fetch information from the net, Freshdesk acquired Chatimity to strengthen its customer service chatbot capabilities, and Microsoft has had another bash at its AI chatbot with Zo. In process flow scenarios, ChatOps bots will be more fluid in enabling processes using simple commands. You could write something like "I need help with ticket 6876 from network, database, and payment processing," and all necessary information would be pulled for you, from across all relevant systems.

Thanks to science fiction, we can't think about artificial intelligence without summoning the ghost of 2001: A Space Odyssey's killer AI HAL 9000; we have to make the obligatory Terminator reference in any story about cutting edge robots; and the picture that immediately springs to mind when we mention robotic exoskeletons are bulky pieces of kit straight out of Iron Man or the underrated Tom Cruise flick Edge of Tomorrow. However, when it comes to that last research topic, investigators at the Harvard Biodesign Lab are doing everything they can to change our perceptions and convince us that robotic exoskeletons don't have to be rigid cages surrounding a person's limbs, applying torque directly to their joints to aid them with a specific motion. While this approach can be hugely promising in helping individuals with paraplegia, it's less necessary in other scenarios. For example, in situations where you have an individual with gait impairments, but who still has function in their lower limbs (such as a post-stroke patients or individuals with multiple sclerosis), applying the same approach is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The considerable weight of rigid exoskeletons and the energy expenditure they therefore prompt in the person wearing them isn't something to be sniffed at.

Last spring the startup Flow Health began a five-year contract with the Department of Veteran Affairs to examine all historic and ongoing medical records. The startup will use information obtained from those records to train artificial intelligence to, among other things, fight illness and predict disease for the more than eight million people cared for by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Advice and predictions from Flow Health will be presented to health care professionals through Vista, the DoD's open source system for electronic medical records. Doctors can then choose to apply or ignore the advice drawn from the VA's vast storage of medical records. "When a veteran comes in and presents certain clinical symptoms, we can better understand and make predictions about'What is the likely diagnosis? What is the best diagnostic test? What's the best care pathway?' and so forth," CEO Alex Meshkin told VentureBeat in a Skype interview.

Robert Morley, chief operating officer at Excello Law, examines the use of AI in the legal industry. Alongside Brexit and Donald Trump, artificial Intelligence (AI) kept headline writers working overtime in 2016 – each competing for our attention in a world of increasing uncertainty. Online, a clear winner has emerged from this unlikely trio of scary topics: AI returns nearly two billion results in Google search, whereas'The Donald' scores a more modest 368 million and Brexit a mere 108 million. Among articles and blogs about the future of law firms, AI has similarly dominated attention as the number one theme. Underpinned by dystopian visions of lawyers being replaced by robots and the growing ranks of tech companies dedicated to replacing the human element from much of day-to-day legal practice, the future for the lawyer has seemed bleak.