You punch the destination into your phone and a driverless car soon swings to a stop next to you. You jump in and it whisks you north-west towards the I-80 on-ramp. But as you merge with the highway traffic, the car pipes up: "This car runs on the Uber network, which does not cover Detroit. You will be dropped at an appropriate interchange point." The way things are going, this could be the short-term prospect for driverless cars.

As the BigDataNYC 2016 event kicked off at the Mercantile Annex in New York, NY, Dave Vellante (@dvellante), Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), Peter Burris (@plburris) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down to discuss what could be expected from this year's event coverage. In particular, the analysts discussed the recent trends in Big Data toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, becoming increasingly attractive to many companies in the enterprise. AI and machine learning with Hadoop has always been a focus area of Big Data, but recently it appears that more companies are moving away from Hadoop in order to bring more productivity and value to the datasets, according to theCUBE analyst team. The main reason for this was because developers wanted more flexibility, which in turn brought unexpected complexity and then a new wave of innovation. "There is this new wave of innovation, a new wave of opportunity," explained Frick.

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Although cyber attacks against businesses like the recent one against Yahoo are increasing, hackers are using the same techniques they always have. Stuart McClure, the CEO of security startup Cylance, told Fortune's Robert Hackett that "there is nothing new" in how hackers are breaching computer defenses. He compared cyber attacks to thieves breaking into homes. There are only so many ways thieves can sneak inside, and no one has created new methods like a "teleportation device" for criminals to more easily get through the front door, he explained. What's different now is that organizations can now use an artificial intelligence technique called machine learning to better defend themselves against these attacks, McClure said.

There are multiple approaches to tackling self-driving; one is to program algorithms or rules that will tell a car how to behave in specific situations.

With more than 250 automotive companies in the state, from Lear, Kemet, Koyo, to Michelin, BMW, and Bridgestone (to name a few), it is little wonder that South Carolina is ranked #3 in automotive manufacturing strength for many reasons. South Carolina is one of leading locations for vision guided vehicles (VGV), driven in part to the increasing North American fork truck free (FTF) initiatives. Encouraging public-private partnerships, which serve as the foundation for research in South Carolina, world-class brands like BMW and Michelin are partnering with universities to bring collaboration to the next level. At facilities across the state, researchers driven by the needs of the automotive industry work with students, multi-disciplinary faculty members, and industry partners to determine the next generation automation technologies. The automotive sector often requires a proof-of-concept success story in one location before the technology solution is implemented enterprise-wide.

When robots take over the world, they may end up spouting the kind of quick-paced dialogue that makes Romance novels and thrillers the most popular genres among readers. The Guardian reports that Google has "swallowed" thousands of books to create artificial intelligence, including thrillers, romance novels, and other genres. Forster's thriller is just one of 11,000 novels that researchers including Oriol Vinyals and Andrew M Dai at Google Brain have been using to improve the technology giant's conversational style. After feeding these books into a neural network, the system was able to generate fluent, natural-sounding sentences. According to a Google spokesman – who didn't want to be named – products such as the Google app will be "much more useful if they can capture the nuance of language better".

Operational AI systems (for example, self-driving cars) need to obey both the law of the land and our values. We propose AI oversight systems ("AI Guardians") as an approach to addressing this challenge, and to respond to the potential risks associated with increasingly autonomous AI systems.a These AI oversight systems serve to verify that operational systems did not stray unduly from the guidelines of their programmers and to bring them back in compliance if they do stray. The introduction of such second-order, oversight systems is not meant to suggest strict, powerful, or rigid (from here on'strong') controls. Operations systems need a great degree of latitude in order to follow the lessons of their learning from additional data mining and experience and to be able to render at least semi-autonomous decisions (more about this later).

Ashok Goel is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing. Soon scientists and the public will have the chance to easily test hypotheses about America's ecological challenges with the help of an ensemble of technologies, including artificial intelligence. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology will link their technology for systems thinking with IBM Watson and the Encyclopedia of Life at the Smithsonian. Scientists will then be able to use the information to create their own models about the environment and efficiently test them. The project is one of 10 "Big Data Spokes" announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Nvidia's current Pascal GPUs are generating a lot of enthusiasm, but their successor, the Volta GPU architecture, is on its way next year, and there's a lot to be excited about. Nvidia unveiled Volta in a new Xavier supercomputer chip designed for self-driving cars, with the small surprising coming Wednesday at the company's GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam. Xavier provides unprecedented computing horsepower, allowing cars to recognize images, analyze on-road situations, and take action. Much of the processing will happen on an integrated 512-core Volta GPU. Xavier will power the successor to Nvidia's current self-driving car computer called Drive PX 2. It has dual 8K HDR video recording capabilities, suggesting the new GPU architecture will explore areas beyond 4K graphics.