The Walt Disney Co. is kicking off the third session of its corporate accelerator this week, and revealed 9 new companies admitted to the program. A full list follows at the end of this post. The companies are developing everything from cinematic virtual reality and holographic content, to robots with human-like facial expressions. Because alumni of the Disney Accelerator have scored big partnerships with the media and entertainment juggernaut in the past, it is seen as one of the more desirable corporate accelerators out there. According to research by Future Asia Ventures, there are 131 active corporate accelerators worldwide today, with 13 new programs launching in the first half of 2016.

The Alphabet subsidiary is partnering with a UK hospital to test whether its algorithm can help diagnose diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration sooner. Diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration are serious conditions that can lead to loss of eyesight, and they affect more than 100 million people across the globe. The good news is that early detection can minimize the damage, but the bad news is that diagnosis can often take time. Now, Google DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., hopes to speed up the process by applying artificial intelligence. Optical coherence tomography, a noninvasive imaging technique that can produce 3-D scans of the eye, as well as digital scans of the back of the eye can be used to diagnose both diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration.

Vivek Wadhwa has been named to the Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering faculty as a distinguished fellow on its Silicon Valley campus, the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based university recently announced. In his role, Wadhwa will be teaching classes in exponential technologies, technology convergence and industry disruption, and the new rules of innovation. He will also be researching technologies and helping members of the Pittsburgh faculty connect with the Silicon Valley. "CMU is doing some of the most advanced research in areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, autonomous cars and almost every field of engineering and bioengineering," Wadhwa said in an emailed statement. "This will provide me direct access to the amazing faculty and enable me to help them make a much greater impact on the world."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces to use cloud technologies in industrial production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

The next time you chat with someone on Cisco Systems' Spark messaging service, that someone may not be a co-worker -- or even a person. Welcome to the world of bots. On Monday at the Cisco Live conference, Cisco said it's working with the messaging company Gupshup so more developers can bring their bots into Spark. It also introduced a partnership with Api.ai, a natural-language software company, in part to help developers build interfaces where users can just talk to bots. Bots aren't brand-new to Spark, but Gupshup prides itself on its chat-bot development platform, which is designed to make it easy to build bots and make them available through popular communications channels. The list already includes Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Slack.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 3.69 % breached securities laws by failing to disclose a fatal crash in May involving an electric car that was driving itself, a person familiar with the matter said, heightening scrutiny of how the Silicon Valley company handled the information. The May 7 accident killed the driver, Joshua Brown, a 40-year old Tesla owner who collided with an 18-wheel semi-truck that pulled in front of him on a Florida highway. Tesla alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. car-safety regulator, to the crash and investigated to determine whether the car was using the company's Autopilot system, which lets cars drive themselves under certain circumstances. But Tesla didn't disclose the crash to investors in a securities filing. The car-safety agency opened an investigation into the Autopilot technology.

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Microsoft is using the video game Minecraft to help develop artificial intelligence (AI) which can complete complex tasks, and is opening up the research to the general computing public, according to a Monday announcement. Minecraft has been used by the tech company and several academic computer scientists to help develop sophisticated general artificial intelligence, or AI, which can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. Microsoft has opened up the project to the general computing public via an open-source license. "Minecraft is very close to the real world in many ways," Jose Hernandez-Orallo, who is a professor at the Technical University of Valencia and has used the system to work on AI, wrote in a press statement. "There are so many possibilities."

It's a privilege to have Rama Akkiraju, IBM distinguished engineer and master inventor, participate as a Vision and Opportunity panelist at the 2016 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. I organize the symposium – this year's event takes place July 12 in New York – and recognize the many ways IBM has, over the years, expanded what's possible in the realm of what I'd characterize as "human data." "My team at IBM has been focused on developing technology to better understand people at a deeper level based on sentiment, emotion, attitude, and personality," said Rama. "With our work with Watson APIs – such as Tone Analyzer, Personality Insights, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis – we're working to enable more compassion, engagement, and personalization in conversations across various channels." IBM's Marie Wallace, a 2014 sentiment symposium speaker, relates in a blog article that she "joined IBM in 2001 to build the next generation of NLP technology for IBM… the 3rd generation of IBM LanguageWare, which initially started back in the '80s." And I wrote, myself, in a 2008 InformationWeek article, BI at 50 Turns Back to the Future, about 1950s work by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn on the creation of business intelligence via text analysis.

When Joshua Brown switched on the Autopilot feature of his Tesla Model S on May 7, he would have been warned not to trust it. "Always keep your hands on the wheel. Be prepared to take over at any time," says the standard warning presented when Autopilot is turned on. But later that day Brown was killed when his car drove itself into the side of a semi-trailer that Autopilot had not detected. Federal investigations into the crash by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) may now question whether Tesla's design asks too much of drivers.