The startup yesterday opened a new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, and along with it, a new range of miniature buses that can autonomously take passengers wherever they ask to go. Local Motors' new buses, which look a bit like ski lifts on wheels, are called Olli, and will be puttering around the greater Washington, D.C., area after their maiden voyage yesterday. The electric vehicles, which have a top speed of about 12 mph and a range of roughly 30 miles per charge, use similar technologies to Google's self-driving cars to see the world as they roll around. But they also use Watson, IBM's suite of artificial intelligence software, to understand what's around them as they move, as well as whatever their human passengers ask of them. Olli has the same speech recognition and language understanding built in that allowed Watson to beat a bunch of smart humans at the quiz show "Jeopardy!"

That dream of universal expertise is what IBM says its Watson question-answering, machine-learning system makes possible. Watson can be trained to answer questions on any subject you choose. The system uses natural language processing to read huge numbers of documents, extracts and organises information about a particular topic and then refines its understanding of that subject based on human feedback. But how useful are the answers given by Watson and how difficult is it to train? One person who's well-placed to talk about using the Jeopardy!-winning

National Harbor, MD - 16 Jun 2016: Local Motors, the leading vehicle technology integrator and creator of the world's first 3D-printed cars, today introduced the first self-driving vehicle to integrate the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of IBM (NYSE: IBM) Watson. Starting today, Olli will be used on public roads locally in DC, and late in 2016 in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas. "Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue," Rogers said. "Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we've been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future. I'm thrilled to see what our open community will do with the latest in advanced vehicle technology."

What happened to the IBM Watson X Prize? The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE ... was announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016. It is a 5 million competition.... Complete rules and guidelines will be made available in May.

IBM delivers cognitive computing to healthcare and weather forecasting. Google launches a new machine learning research center. GE uses machine learning to restore a power plant in Northern Italy. Microsoft acquires one of the big contributors to big data open source software. Those are the highlights of this week's Big Data Roundup.

We get asked a lot of questions about how to start building with Watson, so we decided to compile our top 4 Frequently Asked Questions. You can use this as a guide to learn more about the technology, receive inspiration from use cases, get valuable resources, and ultimately begin building with the technology. Cognitive technology's strength lies in its ability to draw insights from unstructured data sets. Structured data is found in a spreadsheet, whereas unstructured data is text such as tweets, medical journals, etc. Today 80% of data is unstructured, so tools such as cognitive computing are becoming more important in helping humans understand what's inside that data.

If a new driverless shuttle bus makes riders nervous, IBM's Watson system is on board to make feel passengers feel less alone. And the bus' cute name – Olli – might help, too. TechRepublic reports that Maryland's Local Motors is partnering with IBM on its autonomous shuttle bus named Olli. IBM is contributing its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive cognitive computing system. This comes as the global market for self-driving cars is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years.

IBM Watson is probably still best known for crushing it on Jeopardy. Now the same artificial intelligence software is being used for a new fleet of self-driving buses currently roaming the streets of Washington, D.C. Developed by Local Motors, Olli is an electric, 3D printed transportation pod. It can carry up to 12 people and travel about 30 miles per charge at a speed of up t0 12 miles per hour. It uses a technology similar to Google's self-driving cars to scan the environment and get around, but the company says there's also a human monitoring Olli remotely just in case something goes wrong What really makes Olli special is the way it integrates IBM Watson. Instead of typing out your destination you can simply say "Olli, take me downtown."

IBM has teamed up with an electric vehicle company to put its Watson artificial intelligence into a driverless electric bus. Dubbed Olli, the autonomous vehicle will be used to take passengers around Washington DC, and is the brainchild of Local Motors, the Arizona-based automaker. It said its bus is the first vehicle to use IBM Watson's car-focused cognitive learning platform, Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive. Local Motors unveiled the bus at its new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, 12 miles from the US capital. The bus itself is 3D-printed and can carry up to 12 people and is powered by an electric motor.

Local Motors, well known for the crowdsourced Rally Fighter off-road coupe, has been diversifying lately. After starting some 3D-printed projects, it has gone in yet another direction, announcing the Olli, an electric minibus that looks like a large phonebooth that's been tipped on its side. Local Motors refers to the vehicle as a shuttle it will transport up to 12 people from location to location along a pre-set route. The plan is to allow an Olli to be summoned using an app or a kiosk. It uses lidar, cameras, and GPS to move along its route, making adjustments as needed to avoid collisions.