Geneva, March 7th - Goodyear has revealed its long-term vision for future smart, connected tires. In an evolving mobility ecosystem defined by the transition to driverless vehicles and shared mobility in urban centers, Goodyear aims to revolutionize the interaction between tires, vehicles and their surroundings. Goodyear unveiled the Eagle 360 Urban, its latest concept tire, at the Geneva International Motor Show. This 3-D printed sphere is the first concept tire to be powered by Artificial Intelligence and able to sense, decide, transform and interact. "A revolution will take place at the intersection of autonomy, mobility and connectivity. As this unfolds, tire technology will be even more important than it is today. To safely navigate their surroundings, the autonomous vehicles of the future will need to learn to cope with the millions of possible unknowns we face in every day driving scenarios. To do so they will need access to data and the ability to learn and adapt," said Jean-Claude Kihn, president of Goodyear Europe, Middle East and Africa.

On January 25, 1979, 25-year-old Robert Williams climbed into a storage rack to retrieve parts from a malfunctioning robot at Ford's Flat Rock plant in Michigan. The robot, not able to sense Williams' presence, swung round and struck him on the head, killing him instantly. The robot kept working for 30 minutes as Williams lay dead on the floor. His death, nearly forty years ago, makes Williams the first person to be killed as a result of actions by a robot. In August 1983, his family was awarded $10 million after a jury ruled against Unit Handling, the company that designed the one-ton machine.

For the last 15 years we've had to stare at screens to interact with the magic inside. But machine learning is changing the way we communicate with our devices, and our relationship with them is becoming more real, and downright emotional. Before you shrug off the notion of a humanized machine, or shake your head at its potential dangers, it is important to recognize that the industry has always attempted to provide an emotional input to our virtual ecosystem. Take Clippit, Microsoft's creepy but helpful talking paper clip--or even the smiling Mac. If you were to open up a '90s version of Microsoft Office, Clippit would be there to make you happy (or angry).

Knox speaks about an add-on to a Hexbug, a six-legged robotic toy, that makes the bot behave more like a character. They discuss the novel way Knox uses machine learning to create a sense character. They also discuss the limitation of technology to emulate living creatures, and how the bots_alive robot was built within these limitations. Dr. Bradley Knox is the founder of bots_alive. He researched human-robot interaction, interactive machine learning, and artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and at UT Austin.

Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent--or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google's new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard. The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research's Zurich office). Don't pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can't find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good. There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression.

Chatbots have now entered the world of the Indian financial services industry. Two life insurance companies, Birla Sun Life Insurance and HDFC Life, recently rolled out their own versions of chatbots. Among the banks, HDFC Bank has its own electronic virtual assistant or EVA. First, there was robo-advisory for those looking for automated advice and a platform to invest in mutual funds (MFs), and now chatbots suggest insurance policies and answer customer queries. Chatbots could very well be here to stay.

Just days later, we got our first hint Buffett himself was buying Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)! Followed shortly after by that bombshell CNBC interview (here's the transcript), where he revealed an $18 billion plus Apple investment*, the vast majority bought by him in January and recent months (and the rest by Todd and Ted in early-2016). What better confirmation of my assertion that value investors - even the greatest of them all, at 86 years of age - would be wise to pose such a question to themselves? In fact, I wonder if it's the largest stock investment ever made by a single investor (again, in terms of cost)? Sure, Todd, Ted, and Charlie did provide some inspiration and feedback here, but we can be sure Buffett never buys anything until he makes his own mind up! Thoughts?] Was I confident I'd see Buffett talking up an Apple position just weeks later? And maybe I chose it specifically as the largest, most obvious and controversial value stock out there. Not to mention, the head fake I pulled: While I did summarize its attractive fundamentals and valuation, my post clearly wasn't intended to be a detailed thesis. But hey, it was still the right question at the right time, so I'll take the kudos!

For designers, that represents a major business opportunity. But AI is also a challenge requiring every strength and skill they've learned and many they haven't. They will have to understand sociology, psychology, and biology. They will have to develop a working knowledge of statistics. Creativity and attention to detail–designers' stock in trade–won't be enough.

An update to Keras provides a long-term stable API, native TensorFlow version, SkyMind Deep Learning 4 J implementation, and several important updates. I found this great deep dive analysis of text analysis and understanding. The article Multilingual Parsing From Raw Text to Universal Dependencies has a lot of projects. I will be keeping an eye on this one to see some practical business uses. This is a great place to stop learning how to do image classification without a lot of data using Keras.

Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk first warned us about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk then turned around and with other technologists put $1B into starting a nonprofit research effort - OpenAI just to "keep an eye on it"! Facebook, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Shopify and others are charging full steam at AI and even open sourcing it! So what is all the AI ruckus about? AI has been subject matter for science fiction for a long time now. Every SciFi show you can think of has a intelligent computer or robot as a sidekick or with some prominent role.