Most car company executives appear at the annual Los Angeles Auto Show to tout their brand's new vehicles or crow about its balance sheet. Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields came to town this year to give the kick-off keynote speech at AutoMobility L.A., the industry-only portion of the massive car show, and didn't discuss those things at all. Instead, he talked about the future of mobility, the "city of tomorrow" and how Ford is trying to find its place in a changing transportation landscape that -- confronting autonomous driving, connected cars and ride-sharing -- may soon have no place for traditional car companies. The following is an edited version of the conversation. Ford produces the F-150 truck, the most popular vehicle sold in America, but is also offering a hydrogen fuel cell Clarity and a line of plug-in hybrids.

Google's AI is not just better at grasping languages like Mandarin, but can now translate between two languages it hasn't even trained on. In a research paper, Google reveals how it uses its own "interlingua" to internally represent phrases, regardless of the language. The resulting "zero-shot" deep learning lets it translate a language pair with "reasonable" accuracy, as long as it has translated them both into another common language. The company recently switched its Translate feature to the deep-learning Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system. That's an "end-to-end learning framework that learns from millions of examples," the company says, and has drastically improved translation quality.

Two eye-catching Machine-Learning libraries, PHP-ML and Skale-ML, written in PHP and Node.js respectively, are found in this week. Is this a sign of the up-coming wide-spread of ML everywhere? Deep Learning Papers by Nam Vu Papers about deep learning ordered by task, date. Current state-of-the-art papers are labelled. If you have subscribed this blog, please make sure to change the feed address.

Shopping mall travel agency shops are so 1999 and online booking needs more interaction, right? Wouldn't you prefer to book after chatting to a virtual'bot' that has more cognitive power and destination intelligence than a human being? IBM is opening a new raft of UK cloud datacenters, but positive progress asside this is not necessarily news. Every weighty cloud player worth its salt is continuing to press ahead with datacenter expansion plans across the European mainland (Rackspace has just announced plans for a new German facility this week) and similar expansion is being seen in the Americas and the rest of the world. All of this (largely, it appears) irrespective of Brexit, the new US presidency and the current state of play on Dancing With The Stars and/or Strictly Come Dancing (delete as'transatlantically' appropriate).

Organisations including the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions will be able to see UK citizen's entire internet browsing history in weeks. The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was all but passed into law this week, forces internet providers to keep a full list of Internet Connection Records (ICRs) for a year, and make them available to the government if it asks. Those ICRs effectively serve as a full list of every website that people have visited, not collecting which specific pages are visited or what's done on them but serving as a full list of every site that someone has visited and when. And those same ICRs will be made available to a wide range of government bodies. Those include expected law enforcement organisations like the police, the military and the secret service – but also contain bodies like the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, council bodies and the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust.

I have been giving two talks recently on the machine learning workflow, discussing pain points within it and how we might address them. First one was at Spark Summit Europe at Brussels, the other one at MLConf at San Francisco. You can find videos and slides for each below. Main message is that the machine learning workflow is not that simple. That was a great event.

For Katja Hofmann, Minecraft is not just a virtual world: it is a gym for artificial intelligences. Hofmann, 36, is the lead researcher on Microsoft Research Lab's Project Malmo, an open-source platform that makes it possible to test AIs inside the game's pixelated universe. "A question in artificial intelligence is how we get AIs to learn how to interact in a complex environment, to experiment in a wide range of settings," she says. Researchers using Project Malmo, which was made available to developers in July 2016 after a year of in-house testing at Microsoft's Cambridge-based lab, can create AI agents and set them loose in a modified version of Minecraft's free-to-roam 3D environment. There, through trial and error, the agents learn how to move, walk and dodge obstacles in a physically consistent world - something usually requiring expensive robots.

In Slack's vision of the future, it will be totally unnecessary to try to get your inbox to zero every day. In fact, it will be unnecessary to read most of your emails. The communication software company lets teams chat in real time and share files. Earlier this year, Slack introduced the Slackbot, a chatbot meant to help users navigate the app more easily. Ask the bot a straightforward question about how to use Slack ("How do I edit a message I've posted?") and it will deliver the answer.

SAN FRANCISCO – It sounds like a great idea: Instead of passwords, lock your phone or computer with your fingerprint. But this convenient form of security may not be as safe as you might think. In their rush to do away with the problem of passwords, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies are nudging consumers to use their fingerprints, face and eyes as digital keys. Smartphones and other devices increasingly feature scanners that can verify your identity via these biometric signatures in order to unlock a gadget, sign into web accounts and authorize electronic payments. Hackers could still steal the digital representation of your fingerprint.

You're almost done when that annoying Captcha screen comes up and makes you type some blurry letters and numbers into a box. This step, as most people know, is to ensure that you're just a person buying tickets and not a computer program deployed to illicitly to grab up a bunch of seats. But why can't a computer that can perform calculations astronomically faster than humans identify the letter B just because it's in a fancy font with a strikethrough, or the number 5 in a fuzzy photo of a front door? Why is it so easily baffled by something the average second-grader can handle? The answer lies in understanding the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) -- what it's capable of, what is still beyond its grasp, and how we may be rocketing toward an increasingly intelligent technology without enough thought about the implications for ourselves and our planet.