Emerging from stealth mode, self-driving car start-up Drive.ai Drive.ai announced today its first commercial foray, a retrofit kit to make fleet vehicles, from delivery trucks to car services, self-driving. The kit includes a sensor array, computer and an LED sign to communicate with pedestrians and other drivers. Self-driving car technology is being developed by most major automakers, automotive equipment suppliers and start-up companies such as Drive.ai. The intent is to eliminate the 95 percent of fatal car accidents every year that are attributable to human error.

If CES is the tech industry's Super Bowl, IFA is like the NCAA Football Bowl. Not quite the trendsetting tech event of the year, but still worth getting excited for. Held annually in Berlin, Germany, IFA is essentially Europe's version of CES with one big key difference: It's open to the public and not just industry folks. We'll be bringing you all the major tech news from the proceedings all week. It's been a quiet year for smartwatches.

People convey meaning by what they say as well as how they say it: Tone, word choice and the length of a phrase are all crucial cues to understanding what's going on in someone's mind. When a psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person, they listen for these signals to get a sense of their wellbeing, drawing on past experience to guide their judgment. Researchers are now applying that same approach, with the help of machine learning, to diagnose people with mental disorders. In 2015, a team of researchers developed an AI model that correctly predicted which members of a group of young people would develop psychosis--a major feature of schizophrenia--by analyzing transcripts of their speech. This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like "this," "that," and "a," as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next.

Two London trusts have become the first in UK to establish data sharing between their Cerner Health Information Exchanges, covering a population of 1.3 million people. Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust went live on with the connection 12 July, with clinicians in both acute hospitals able to view a summarised care record from the other site. The visible information for each trust includes discharge summaries, diagnosis, medications, investigations and results. Niall Canavan, Homerton Hospital's director of information technology, said the next step was "to open this data to any contributing partner organisation in east London". Charles Gutteridge, Barts' chief clinical information officer, said the move had been "relatively simple to do, as Homerton also used the Cerner Millennium system, but a really big step forward".

Though I haven't lived there for nearly three decades, I still consider myself a citizen of Los Angeles. That means, among other things, I drive. For me, a car is like a suit or a good exoskeleton. Road trips, going 100 miles per hour on a freeway, racing through Park La Brea--they're all sewn as tightly into my DNA as ice-skating in Central Park is for a New Yorker. Despite that heritage, I've been running an experiment on myself and my hometown. My last three trips there, I didn't rent a car; it's been nothing but taxis, Uber, and one time I borrowed my dad's. Not only did I move through space and time every bit as efficiently--more, if you believe that screwing around on Twitter and email is useful--I took new routes.

English novelist Emily Brontë may have suffered from a form of autism formerly known as Asperger syndrome, according to her biographer. During an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday in the U.K., Claire Harman -- author of recent biography "Charlotte Brontë: A Life" -- discussed many of Brontë's traits, some of which she said resembled symptoms related to Asperger's, the Guardian reported. Brontë's personality characteristics and behaviors -- like her genius, her dislike of leaving home, social discomfort and sudden bursts of anger and frustrations -- could have brought about a prognosis of the disorder if she was alive in more modern-day times, Harman added. Harman recounted one of the "Wuthering Heights" author's temperamental instances that was documented by biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote in an 1857 biography on Charlotte Brontë about a time her younger sister left the family dog "half blind and stupefied" after punching the dog in the face for dirtying the laundry. Harman said the incident was "just a sign of Emily's strength and character."

A Markov chain is a random process with the property that the next state depends only on the current state. For example: If you have the choice of red or blue twice the process would be Markovian if each time you chose the decision had nothing to do with your choice previously (see diagram below). How can Markov Chains help us? To start with we need to define some basic terminology. The changes of state within the system are called transitions, and the probabilities associated with various state-changes are called transition probabilities.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. Pharmaceutical company Mylan is still in the news after hiking the price of life-saving EpiPens by more than 400%. But keep this in mind: Of roughly 250 million raised for and against 17 ballot measures coming before California voters in November, more than a quarter of that amount -- about 70 million -- has been contributed by deep-pocketed drug companies to defeat the Drug Price Relief Act, which would limit drug prices charged to state healthcare programs. Spending on the measure could set a state record over coming weeks. No buzz kill: New federal rules for small commercial drones go into effect Monday.

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had found the perfect father for their baby. Seven years after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a narcissistic personality disorder and a criminal history. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation. The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donor's name, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple.

Ariel lost 20 lbs of weight and documented his progress using a series of scripts. The VW project is co-sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo Research. Ariel had logged his data as a simple CSV file using only weight, sleep, exercise and foods consumed as data points. He then wrote a perl script to convert his CSV over to the vowpal-wabbit traning-set. He learned which foods, exercise and sleep patterns showed a positive correlation with weight loss.