Only nine states and Washington, D.C., have laws on the books related to autonomous vehicles. Olli, a self-driving bus, is set to debut in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Local Motors) SAN FRANCISCO - If you've got tech skills and are interested in self-driving cars, there's a good chance you'll wind up working in the Bay Area. Where jobs in the automotive field were once exclusively tied to Detroit, the mushrooming importance of software to mobility has seen employment opportunities migrate west as established automakers such as Ford Motor and Mercedes-Benz boost their ranks in Silicon Valley. That shift is borne out by data provided to USA TODAY by Paysa, a site that uses machine learning to provide salary information and career success insights for both job seekers and businesses. Over the past six months, dozens of companies looking for self-driving car talent posted more than 350 job listings, with 230 of those jobs based in either Mountain View or Palo Alto.

"If you don't innovate fast, disrupt your industry, disrupt yourself, you will be left behind." To orchestrate this transformation, organizations must revamp their IT strategies and roadmaps and ingest the value of artificial intelligence and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration. These technologies go hand in hand because they cover the same spectrum. AI-enabled ERP solutions will by default impact the heart and soul of day-to-day operations. The mix of people, process and technology is going to change.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five and J.K.Rowling's series of Harry Potter novels describe the time travel paradox. Traveling through time changes the future from the point in time where the traveler arrived. The personal assistant that will arrive at some time in the future will change humans from that point in time forward, but in a more impactful way than GPS. Google and Facebook have recruited the best artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning talent in the world to build personal assistants in small increments. The personal assistant's intimate knowledge of users' likes and dislikes and awareness of situational context could be like Samantha depicted in the movie Her, but without an emotional relationship so users will not fall in love with their assistants.

If you think artificial intelligence is some futuristic concept relegated to science fiction novels and film, you're wrong. In fact, artificial intelligence (AI) is present in our daily lives--when we search Google or buy products on Amazon. Simply defined, AI is an area of computer science that explores the capability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as reasoning, planning, learning, and understanding language. For AI to work, it requires three major elements: smarter data models, easy access to unlimited amounts of data, and cheap and powerful cloud computing. Today, these three elements are becoming not only accessible, but commonplace.

While transportation, hospitality, and financial services are all industries being disrupted by technology, the next big area poised for massive, tech-driven change may be the human workforce. "We are going to move from people to things," explained Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup's Latin America business, speaking Monday at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. "We are expecting 500 billion objects to become connected to the internet and this automation is going to hollow out middle and working class jobs," explained Fraser. "Technology is replacing these jobs." The technology Fraser is referring to is artificial intelligence--the machine learning that powers driverless cars and other intelligent machines that are slowly taking over human tasks.

A new "human-in-the-loop" product debuted at the Microsoft Machine Learning & Data Science Summit through a partnership with CrowdFlower, a popular platform that allows data scientist teams to use large-scale human intelligence to enrich and label their data. These human-in-the-loop workflows combine human intelligence and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. Businesses benefit from the efficiency of machine learning and the quality of human judgments. Machines can automate a majority of the work, while humans can assist when the machine is uncertain. Head over to the Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog for an overview of what human-in-the-loop is, when and where it can be used, and the opportunities ahead in this area.

To build the feature libraries for auto-featurization, we leverage algorithms from decades of Microsoft research in natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, speech, big data and much more – the same algorithms that power products such as Bing, Cortana and Microsoft Office. Today we have started with a basic set of text featurizers, and we will be continually expanding the selection overtime. For example, coming soon, we will be adding support for deep neural network based featurizers. The power of these feature libraries is that they are usually trained on a large amount of data that is not available to most users (e.g. DNN image featurizer, trained on tens of millions of annotated images, or DSSM, trained on years of click data from Bing Ads and web search), and they save users weeks or months relative to training their own complex models.

Enterprises today are finding it exceedingly meaningful and resourceful in the massive amounts of data they generate and save every day. The required algorithms, applications and frameworks to bring greater predictive accuracy and value to enterprises' data sets are available; therefore, businesses need to make sure they have data sets of sufficient size and quality. It is due to the excessive need to do a better job in capturing and utilizing data. The rise of deep learning and neural networks has spread in everyday lives. It took about six years for neural nets to show impressive results, first in speech recognition, then computer vision, images, image detection and diagnostics, and more recently, in natural language processing.

Apple is hiring a rising star in the world of deep learning to serve as its first director of AI research. Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, will assume the new position, which is meant to help the company make sure that Siri and its other products make use of the fundamental breakthroughs coming out of academic AI research. Salakhutdinov will talk about his research at EmTech MIT 2016, an MIT Technology Review conference held this week. Salakhutdinov researches very large neural networks used in a technology called deep learning, which lets a computer learn to perform a difficult task by consuming copious training examples. He will continue to work part time at CMU and will hire a team of researchers to work with him at Apple.

Deep learning is a relatively new term, although it has existed prior to the dramatic uptick in online searches of late. Enjoying a surge in research and industry, due mainly to its incredible successes in a number of different areas, deep learning is the process of applying deep neural network technologies - that is, neural network architectures with multiple hidden layers - to solve problems. Deep learning is a process, like data mining, which employs deep neural network architectures, which are particular types of machine learning algorithms. Deep learning has racked up an impressive collection of accomplishments of late. In light of this, it's important to keep a few things in mind, at least in my opinion: As shown in the image above, deep learning is to data mining as (deep) neural networks are to machine learning (process versus architecture).