Apple faces major obstacles to becoming a car company--or even a supplier of navigation and infotainment systems voluntarily integrated into vehicles by auto manufacturers. Hopelessly addicted to rich margin, premium iPhones, Apple doesn't have much to offer automakers, and what little it could offer will be rejected for good business reasons. Apple designs premium smartphones and consumer products, contracting their manufacture to a mature Chinese supply chain. Reports by Bloomberg and The New York Times about Apple's shift in its autonomous car program missed this most fundamental point. But the shift from building an autonomous electric vehicle (EV) to building the software that guides self-driving vehicles will not earn Apple a leading position in the autonomous vehicle business.

Mercedes-Benz, whose engineers have been working on self-driving car technology, is eager to increase the size of its engineering team both in Silicon Valley and in Germany. SAN FRANCISCO - So you say you want join the automotive revolution? Over the past few years, only elite roboticists have been positioned to heed the self-driving car's call to action. Armed with degrees from places such as Carnegie Mellon University and experience at institutions such as NASA, these tech titans have been highly sought after by technology and automotive companies looking to build the future. But now massive open online course pioneer Udacity has a proposition: Give the Web-based education outfit 36 weeks and 2,400, and they'll turn graduates onto jobs at autonomous-car partner companies Mercedes-Benz, Didi Chuxing, Nvidia and Otto.

This turns out to have been an awkward thing for Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf to have said about Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo's head of Community Banking, when she announced her retirement in July: "A trusted colleague and dear friend, Carrie Tolstedt has been one of our most valuable Wells Fargo leaders, a standard-bearer of our culture, a champion for our customers, and a role model for responsible, principled and inclusive leadership," said John Stumpf, Wells Fargo's chairman and chief executive officer. It turns out that Wells Fargo's community banking culture involved creating millions of fake accounts for customers to satisfy the bank's frenzy for cross-selling products and services. And Tolstedt now gets to bear the standard for that culture, as the Senate investigates, Fortune reports that "she will be walking away with 124.6 million in stock, options, and restricted Wells Fargo shares," and shareholders have called for her to be held responsible for the fake accounts by clawing back her pay: Another investor said: "If this person presided over this, why no accountability? We have share-based pay so that it can be clawed back when people have been earning bonuses under false pretences, and if fraudulently opening client accounts isn't false pretences, then I don't know what is." Wells Fargo's cross-selling scandal is so odd because it is both at the absolute core of the bank's business, and also curiously irrelevant.

BRANFORD, Conn., Sept. 13, 2016 -- BioXcel, a privately held biopharmaceutical company based in Connecticut, today announced that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug Designation to BXCL101 for the treatment of Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2), an orphan disease with significant unmet medical need. BXCL101 is the first and only systemic therapy being developed to eliminate existing lesions and prevent the formation of new lesions by targeting the molecular mechanism of NF2 pathophysiology. BXCL101 is a proprietary version of an approved drug, bortezomib, adapted for chronic use in NF2 patients with both a novel dosing regimen and delivery approach. NF2 is a rare disease associated with neurologic and ophthalmologic abnormalities caused by benign tumors of the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves. BXCL101 is the first drug candidate discovered using BioXcel's R&D Platform, to be granted orphan drug status by the FDA.

This is a guest post by Erik Meijer (@headinthebox). He is an accomplished programming-language designer who runs the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft and a professor of Cloud Programming at TUDelft. There is a lot of hype and mystique around Machine Learning these days. The combination of the words "machine" and "learning" induces hallucinations of intelligent machines that magically learn by soaking up Big Data and then both solving world hunger and making us rich while we lay on the beach sipping a cold one. However, just as normal programmers can write code without needing to understand Universal Turing Machines, power domains, or predicate transformers, we believe that normal programmers can use Machine Learning without needing to understand vectors, features, probability density, Jacobians, etc.

Researchers are turning to an ironic source for help in teaching machine learning programs about how to drive: the chaotic vigilante driving game Grand Theft Auto. Bear with us here, because this actually makes a ton of sense. Researchers at Intel Labs and Darmstadt University in Germany could map their own simulators to create real-world scenarios, but there's already a program out there with a realistic driving experience complete with pedestrians and other vehicles: Grand Theft Auto. So they've essentially annotated a version of the game to give cars real-world driving experience. No, they don't get guns or any of the "other" parts of the game, but anyone who has played GTA knows that the driving conditions are pretty true to real life.

Actuarial tables are a cornerstone of insurance and are a very basic form of machine learning. Take, for instance, mortality tables. These tables produce highly specific and shockingly accurate projections of how people born within a certain period will live. These projections don't just materialize out of thin air. They are formed and refined by millions of data points and real life examples inputted into the tables and then evaluated on an aggregate level.

It's pretty difficult to make digital marketing sexy, but crystal (yes, with a lower-case c, which is going to drive journalists and copy-editors bananas for the foreseeable future) is going at it with both barrels. Launched in public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Alley, the product features beautiful dashboards, smart AI and Siri-like voice control. Its self-learning algorithms can learn when a company's audiences are most likely to respond to marketing messaging and much more. The dashboard in crystal is scrumptious and looks even better with the animations. "We like to call it an advisor rather than a virtual assistant," says Marco Cartasegna, one of the company's founders.

On August 1st in 1981, MTV launched, and the face of music changed forever. And again, in the early nineties and noughties when the internet gave rise to iTunes and Amazon. You don't see people carrying portable CD players or waiting in line to buy the latest album release. Algorithms, robots, automation, machine learning (the list goes on) are all technologies impacting our everyday lives and traditional industries, particularly the financial sector. Take credit cards -- only effectively differentiated on two fronts: eligibility and price.

Michael Dell has unveiled newly merged Dell and EMC company Dell Technologies, with a strategy to address the IT infrastructure needs of a world of intelligent things. A collection of our most popular articles for IT leaders from the first few months of 2016, including: - Corporate giants recruit digitally-minded outsiders to drive transformation - Analytics platforms to drive strategy in 2016 - Next generation: The changing role of IT leaders. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant topic offers from TechTarget and its partners.