Think about autonomous vehicles as disrupters. They will disrupt everything we currently take for granted about how we get from here to there. This is obvious the further one gets into a new report, Autonomous Vehicles Meet Human Drivers: Traffic Safety Issues for States, prepared for the Governors Highway Safety Association (G.H.S.A.). Even though the report is written for state Departments of Transportation, Departments of Motor Vehicles, and State Highway Safety Offices, it has implications for all of us since -- even if you don't plan to buy a driverless vehicle -- you will be sharing the road with them. It's a very readable report, not technical, and its author, James Hedlund, calls it "AV 101".

One of the earliest real robot mecha anime of the 80's that defined decades of anime and video games to follow was that of Fang of the Sun Dougram. Now after all these years, Bandai has given us probably the best toy of the titular mecha. Fang of the Sun Dougram was set in the far off future where humanity has colonized various planets outside of our solar system, all of which are run by the Earth Federation. In a coup d'état on the planet Deloyer, the governor is seemingly replaced by a military dictatorship all under the approval of the Federation. The former governor's son, Crinn Cashim, steals a prototype combat armor called the Dougram and with a group of ragtag rebels fights back against this tyranny and in doing so free Deloyer's citizens from martial rule.

Chat apps characteristics make them very appealing to businesses and marketers. Prominent ones include their size, user retention, usage rates, and user demographics. In fact, the combined user base of the top four chat apps is larger than that of the top four social networks. Chat apps also have higher retention and usage rates than most mobile apps. Finally, the majority of their users are young, an extremely important demographic for brands, advertisers and publishers.

To test its AI agents, DeepMind developed two new games, called Gathering and Wolfpack. In Gathering, two colored squares are tasked with picking up "apples" in the middle of the screen. They can also fire a laser which, if accurate, removes the other character from the game temporarily. How co-operative or combative would they be? Unsurprisingly, the pair was quite peaceful at the start, collecting apples at a steady pace.

Since 2006, NASA has had a trio of small, free-flying robots on board the International Space Station. Called SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites), these robots have spent about 600 hours participating in an enormous variety of experiments, including autonomous formation flying, navigation and mapping, and running programs written by middle school students in team competitions. But beyond serving as a scientific platform, SPHERES weren't designed to do anything especially practical in terms of assisting the astronauts or flight controllers, and it's time for a new generation of robotic free fliers that's fancier, more versatile, and will be a big help for the humans on the ISS. Last fall, IEEE Spectrum visited NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to have a look at the latest Astrobee prototype and meet the team behind the robot. Astrobee is a cube about 32 centimeters on a side.

Looking for patterns in large volumes of data is hardly new for insurance companies. In fact, big data is almost the foundation upon which the insurance industry is built. It's how decisions are made and policies are determined. And insurers are not oblivious to how technology can enable this; half of insurance executives are prioritising technology investments to capture new client insights over the next three years. '90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years,' says George Lee, CIO at Goldman Sachs.

It is going to be an interesting year. Never before have we seen so much creativity, innovation, and evolution. Trend watchers are going berserk with all the cool new ideas being born every minute, and futurologists are seeing their predictions come true sooner than expected. The second machine age is here, and what an exciting time it is! But running a competitive business is challenging as we tumble from one paradigm to another.

In the future, it's likely that many aspects of human society will be controlled -- either partly or wholly -- by artificial intelligence. AI computer agents could manage systems from the quotidian (e.g., traffic lights) to the complex (e.g., a nation's whole economy), but leaving aside the problem of whether or not they can do their jobs well, there is another challenge: will these agents be able to play nice with one another? What happens if one AI's aims conflict with another's? Will they fight, or work together? Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind has been exploring this problem in a new study published today.

Imbalanced classification tasks have been studied by the research community for a long time. Numerous problems have been identified with standard approaches and new proposals have been put forward for addressing these relevant tasks. Surprisingly, the same attention has not been given to predictive tasks with a numeric target variable, i.e. regression. However, similar problems occur on these domains, when the target of the end-user is the performance on a subset of rare values of the target variable. As in classification standard evaluation metrics fail, and new approaches are required to bias the learning algorithms to the end-user goals.

I believe "less is more" will become the mantra for companies that need to consolidate their various service-driven mobile apps into one enterprise app. The goal will be to integrate data, analytics and insights into a single platform to create a more seamless customer experience. We helped one of our clients do this by deconstructing its old digital presence and revamping its mobile offering. After assessing its needs and analyzing user behavior, we helped them create a mobile app that integrated web functionality with mobile. Meanwhile, Google is reimagining apps with the introduction of Instant Apps.