A fatal accident that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot technology was engaged may have a significant bearing on the future of automated driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said yesterday that it is investigating the accident, which occurred near Williston, Florida, last month when a Model S crashed into a trailer making a left turn in front of it. NHTSA's investigation does not mean the agency believes the technology contributed to the accident or is defective. But the incident will inevitably raise questions about the performance of the technology and the way drivers treat it. The auto industry will certainly watch closely to see how it may shape regulations and influence the public perception of automated-driving technology.

The man killed in a crash while using the autopilot function of a Tesla Model S electric vehicle posted a YouTube video a month before the fatal crash showing the technology saving him from another collision and wrote that he was "very impressed." I have done a lot of testing with the sensors in the car and the software capabilities," Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, wrote on April 5 in comments posted with the 41-second video. "I have always been impressed with the car, but I had not tested the car's side collision avoidance," he said. Then on May 7, Brown, a former Navy Seal, was killed when his Tesla crashed into a tractor trailer in Williston, Fla. Federal regulators said Thursday they had opened an investigation into the fatality, thought to be the first in the auto industry involving an autonomous driving feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its Office of Defects Investigation was conducting a preliminary evaluation of the autopilot function. The agency is expected to issue guidelines for autonomous vehicles this month. Automakers do not need to have autonomous driving functions approved by NHTSA but must certify their vehicles meet safety standards. Calling Brown's death "a tragic loss," Tesla said it was the first-known fatality involving its autopilot feature. The technology, which is in public beta testing and must be activated by the driver, has been used in 130 million miles of driving without a fatality, the company said. The crash took place at 3:40 p.m. May 7 on U.S. Route 27A during clear and dry conditions, according to the accident report from the Florida Highway Patrol. Brown's vehicle was headed east when a tractor trailer driven by Frank Baressi of Palm Harbor, Fla., traveling in the opposite direction, made a left turn onto a side street. The Tesla's roof hit the underside of the tractor trailer. The car skidded under the truck and off the road, plowing through two wire fences before crashing into a utility pole, the accident report said. Baressi told the Associated Press that Brown was "playing'Harry Potter' on the TV screen" in the car when the crash took place. Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, told The Times that a portable DVD player was found in the Tesla but said she did not know whether it had been in use. "At the time of the impact, we don't know what the status of that DVD player was.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your unibrowed Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We don't usually lead Video Friday with a long talk, but Nic Radford was at Campus Party in Mexico to talk about Valkyrie and the DRC. It's a tremendous talk, with lots of candid detail and video that we've never seen before.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

We've shown a few times here how you can run R code on data in the cloud with Azure ML Studio, and even how to enable that code as a web service to be called from other applications. But what if you want to run code in a compiled language, like C? Fortunately, you can take advantage of R's built-in support for compiled code, and call it from a package you upload to Azure ML. (A similar process works for Python.) You can read the details in the blog post, Running Compiled Code on Azure ML in R and Python.

"What do I type?" is the big question making chatbots hard to use. So today Facebook Messenger is giving chatbot developers new "Quick Reply" buttons and persistent menu options to make their bots easier to navigate. Messenger bots can also now send videos, audio, GIFs, and files so they can encompass wider range of use cases. People can now rate bots with one to five stars to teach developers how to improve, though there's no word on the chatbot analytics Facebook has promised. And if customers opt in, developers will be able to connect these customers' accounts to Messenger accounts to allow more seamless communication with them.

Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice," Shankland writes. "Get ready, people: It's not that far off." "Since the first AI research effort 60 years ago at a Dartmouth College conference, humanity has been heading toward computer-based systems that can eventually learn and adapt for themselves," Shankland writes. "Super-capable AI will have its downside.

Since the inception of modern fighter planes, it has always been an unspoken assumption that at some point, machines would be flying the aircraft instead of human pilots. This assumption became even more solid once Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology started to pick up. Now, new test results via simulations have shown that AIs are superior to human pilots, particularly when using fighter planes. Engineers that graduated from the University of Cincinnati programmed an AI that was able to outmaneuver and outfly fighter pilots, Wired reports. The program is called "ALPHA," and through multiple simulations against former United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee, the AI came out significantly ahead.

A very good piece by Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review looks at the implications of Intel's announcement that it will slow the rate at which it increases the density of transistors in microprocessors. In one important way, this is an "end of Moore's Law," which predicted that the speed of microprocessors would steadily double every two years, making computation logarithmically cheaper for the foreseeable future. The timescales are getting longer, and may get longer still. Some pin their hopes on fundamental breakthroughs that restore the tempo of Moore's Law, but even in the absence of such a breakthrough, there is still lots of new things that are both plausible and exciting and don't require fundamental, unpredictable scientific discoveries. One such advancement is in fundamental computer science, specifically in "parallelization."

As anyone who endures a call with an automated customer "help line" quickly learns, robots have a frustrating inability to understand sarcasm. It only takes a few minutes of the pseudo-friendly automaton cycling through endless menu selections to trigger a lunge for the 0 button and a desperate plea for "AGENT!" We're even becoming accustomed to the idea that self-driving cars will soon lower our insurance rates and enable virtually uninterrupted texting during waking hours. Automation is now so ubiquitous that it's strange to think that we're entirely at ease with the robots, until we have to talk to them. But don't blame the machines.