The U.S. state of California is easing its rules for autonomous car testing, by allowing testing of vehicles in which there is no human driver. The new rules have yet to be submitted for public consultation, with a final version expected by the end of the year, according to its Department of Motor Vehicles. "These rules expand our existing autonomous vehicle testing program to include testing vehicles where no driver is present," said DMV Director Jean Shiomoto. "This is the next step in eventually allowing driverless autonomous vehicles on California roadways." California took some heat earlier for seeking to stop testing of fully autonomous cars -- those in which a human is not physically on board.

CAPTCHA's are an irritating but necessary evil. The system that is used to verify whether or not a user is human has been around a while and it had to evolve because machines were getting better at reading the text than humans. With its latest iteration, Google says you'll no longer have to input anything at all. When the machines rise up, I'm jumping ship and selling out humanity so fast -- we suck, we deserve it. So colour me excited to see this cute ol' robot arm hilariously beat an'I'm not a robot' CAPTCHA (and then let go of the stylus in a perfect mic drop right after).

It's a total understatement to say that the growing presence of machine learning in games is big news. The technology promises to turn the industry topsy-turvy by changing our perception of what's possible in a gaming experience. "You can actually tailor game design and tailor levels to an individual's experience," George Dolbier, the CTO of Interactive Media at IBM, said at a talk at the Intel Buzz Workshop in Seattle last June. More interesting for us laymen, it's being used to create progressional curves that tailor themselves directly to each player according to their individual behavioral data. A simple example would be in a Tetris-like casual game where a player would first go through a few "seed" rounds of gameplay so that the machine learning element can first learn about how they play before it creates a customized roadmap that will ensure maximum engagement.

Medicine is a complex field. So complex that any given person can't know more than a fraction of what's going on. Keeping up with the latest discoveries is impossible. At the South by Southwest conference event in Austin, TX, a panel of experts came together to discuss the state of medical AI and how machine learning can benefit both patients and doctors. The discussion was moderated by Kay Eron, general manager of health and life sciences at Intel.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has long been one of the holy grails of computer science. While we all know that computers are better than humans at making sense of highly structured information, there are still some important areas where humans are undeniably better than machines. Understanding language is one of those areas. For humans, understanding language is so natural we usually don't even have to make a conscious effort to do it. In reality, though, processing language and turning it into meaningful information is an extremely complex and difficult task.

Now seems like as good of a time as any to post some of the talks that I've done in the last year. I was originally going to give a talk I had done before (hence the same title), but I had some recent inspiration about some issues in the field that I wanted to share. This was a last minute whim, and after 24 hours of neither eating nor sleeping, I finished my slides with 30 minutes to spare. The talk went great and immediately afterwards, I even had the opportunity to do a TWiML podcast (thanks, Sam!). Both were surprisingly well-received, and writing the talk really helped me refine my thoughts on the field and what direction I wanted to take my work.

Imagine that instead of visiting a doctor for a skin abnormality, you could perform a self-examination with your phone, and artificial intelligence would diagnose you. They developed a machine-learning AI that taught itself to diagnose skin cancer the same way a human dermatologist would in an exam, and it worked. The researchers used one of Google's AI systems that was taught to identify different objects. They trained the algorithm on images of different skin ailments to help build a data bank that would be used to compare conditions. The algorithm was tested against dermatologists and it performed just as well.

As I start to look at the emerging trends of 2017 from the vantage of IndieBio, where we see hundreds of biotech startup applications and technologies per year, a few key themes are already emerging. Even as political landscapes change, science and technology continue to push forward. Most of us have seen science fiction shows that show future doctors regrowing and replacing entire organs. That fiction is now becoming a reality with cell therapies from companies like Juno (curing two infants with leukemia of their previously treatment resistant cancers with engineered T-cells), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) pioneered by the Nobel prize winning scientist, Shinya Yamanaka that can become any cell in the body, growing organoids (mini organs with some function of a fully grown organ like the stomach organoids grown by researchers in Ohio), and entirely re-grown organs. There are a plethora of biotechs focused on developing the next generation of regenerative therapies.

WIRE)--Join Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL), a predictive marketing platform, throughout March, as the company participates in three top technology events in 2017: SXSW (March 10 - 15, 2017), IBM InterConnect (March 19 - 23, 2017), and IBM Amplify (March 20 - 22, 2017). Rocket Fuel will take the stage with its partners to share how its predictive marketing platform, combined with the power of AI and machine learning technologies, is changing the way brands and agencies connect with their customers. Have you been struggling to make sense of call transcripts, sales notes and other unstructured data to better understand what's really going on in your sales accounts, products, marketing campaigns and services? Watson Discovery Service can help ... without breaking the bank or the staffing plan. IBM Watson experts will discuss the latest advancements with the service that can enable you to quickly upload, enrich, and index large collections of your private data or public data.

One of the best parts of writing the Afternoon Edition each day is that I get to explore all kinds of interesting topics. Two of those recent topics continue to be all over the news, and they are the issues of robots and automation, and artificial intelligence and the "Singularity." These topics do materially affect markets, although their effect may not be as acute as, say, a monthly employment report. And speaking of which, we got a new monthly employment report this morning, as February saw 235,000 new non-farm payroll jobs created. That's good economic news; however, I wonder how many more jobs would have been created if there weren't as many advancements in the field of automation.