Ford outlined a few of the ways it's aiming to ship driverless cars by 2021, and part of the plan involves acquisitions. CEO Mark Fields revealed at a press event in Palo Alto today that the automaker acquired SAIPS, an Israeli company focusing on machine learning and computer vision. It's also partnering exclusively with Nirenberg Neuroscience, to bring more "humanlike intelligence" to machine learning components of driverless car systems. SAIPS' technology brings image and video processing algorithms, as well as deep learning tech focused on processing and classifying input signals, all key ingredients in the special sauce that makes up autonomous vehicle tech. This company's expertise should help with on-board interpretation of data captured by sensors on Ford's self-driving cars, and turning that data into usable info for the car's virtual driver system.

Ford today announces its intent to have a high-volume, fully autonomous SAE level 4-capable vehicle in commercial operation in 2021 in a ride-hailing or ride-sharing service. This Smart News Release features multimedia. Ford has been researching autonomous vehicles for more than a decade, and intends to have a high-volume, fully autonomous SAE level-4-capable vehicle in commercial operation for ride sharing services in 2021. Ford currently tests fully autonomous vehicles in Michigan, Arizona and California, and will triple its autonomous test fleet this year to have the largest test fleet of any automaker. To get there, the company is investing in or collaborating with four startups to enhance its autonomous vehicle development, doubling its Silicon Valley team and more than doubling its Palo Alto campus.

Imagine the endless possibilities of learning from 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated every day. Artificial intelligence (AI), which began its journey 60 years ago is well on its course to make this implausible scenario a reality. Artificial Intelligence, is slowly taking over our lives. From personal assistants like Siri in Apple products to stock trading to medical diagnosis, AI is able to learn from seemingly unstructured data, take decisions and perform actions in a way previously unimagined. Businesses too are undergoing digitization rapidly.

This essay originally appeared on MIT Sloan Management Review as part of their Frontiers Essay Series. Each essay is a response to this question: "Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?" Artificial Intelligence is about to transform management from an art into a combination of art and science. Not because we'll be taking commands from science fiction's robot overlords, but because specialized AI will allow us to apply data science to our human interactions at work in a way that earlier theorists like Peter Drucker could only imagine. We've already seen the power of specialized AI in the form of IBM's Watson, which trounced the best human players at Jeopardy!, and Google DeepMind's AlphaGo, which recently defeated one of the world's top Go players, Lee Sedol, four games to one.

One of the most fascinating developments in computer user interfaces in recent years is the rise of "bots". Some people hail it as the "new command line", but it is much more than that. It is an Artificial Intelligence "robot" in messaging applications. You can message it as if it is a human user, and ask it to do things for you or have a conversation with you. With the rising popularity of messaging apps, users are increasingly interested in this mode of communication -- some see this as the next step of the continuous user interface evolution from text command line to GUI to web apps to mobile apps and then to "bots". There are already many innovative uses of bots, and people are coming up with new ways every day!

The DGX-1 is a 129,000, desktop-sized box with eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, 7TB of SSD storage and two Xeon processors. That nets 170 teraflops of performance, equivalent to around 250 servers. Moreover, the parallel architecture is ideal for OpenAI's deep learning algorithms. NVIDIA said it cost around 2 billion to develop. OpenAI, founded to ensure that machines don't destroy us, will use the DGX-1's extra power to read the nearly 2 billion Reddit comments in months, rather than years.

More than a century after introducing the Model T, Ford hopes to once again change how the masses move. The company announced this morning that it will have thousands of fully autonomous vehicles in urban car-sharing and ride-hailing fleets by 2021. To achieve that goal, the company will double, to 300, the number of people at its Silicon Valley research center and add 60 autonomous vehicles to the fleet of 30 already deployed there. Google, Nissan, and Mercedes-Benz see autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020, and Chinese tech giant Baidu says it will have the technology in 2019. But none of them has made promises as specific as those Fields made today.

For the first time ever, Ireland will have a field hockey team participating in the Summer Olympics. To make sure its athletes are performing at the highest level, the national team is getting some help from an Ireland-based startup that develops biometric measurement technology to identify players at risk for injury. Kitman Labs, based in Dublin with offices in Silicon Valley, is working with both the Irish national field hockey team and the South African rugby team as they compete in this month's Summer Olympics. The company's "Athlete Optimization System" analyzes athlete data collected from multiple systems including wearable trackers that show workload information and other data related to sleep, hydration, diet, mood, stress, and perceived muscle soreness. Coaches can look at the analytics to help drive decision-making related to the amount of training an athlete should be doing.