Israel artificial intelligence is helping improve safety along a stretch of Las Vegas' busiest highway. The Nevada Highway Patrol says a yearlong partnership between public safety agencies and an Israeli startup technology firm resulted in a 17 percent reduction in crashes along a portion of northbound Interstate 15 just west of the Las Vegas Strip. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Waycare, a provider of artificial intelligence-based mobility products and services for smart cities, helped lead the crash prevention pilot program. Get The Start-Up Israel's Daily Start-Up by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up They hope to use it in other parts of the Las Vegas Valley, including a stretch of US 95 between I-15 and the Rainbow Boulevard curve. The program uses in-vehicle information, cameras, sensors and other traffic data to develop prediction models to reduce congestion.

Las Vegas • Artificial intelligence is helping improve safety along a stretch of Las Vegas' busiest highway. The Nevada Highway Patrol says a yearlong partnership between public safety agencies and a startup technology firm resulted in a 17 percent reduction in crashes along a portion of northbound Interstate 15 just west of the Las Vegas Strip. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Waycare, a provider of artificial intelligence-based mobility products and services for smart cities, helped lead the crash prevention pilot program. They hope to use it in other parts of the Las Vegas Valley, including a stretch of U.S. 95 between I-15 and the Rainbow Boulevard curve. The program uses in-vehicle information, cameras, sensors and other traffic data to develop prediction models to reduce congestion.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, the Nevada Department of Transportation and the Nevada Highway Patrol teamed up for the pilot program with Waycare. The Israeli startup already carried out a similar program in Tel Aviv, and it started a crash prevention program last year in Tampa, Florida.

When Venetian merchants hauled the first shipments of a popular Ottoman drink called coffee into 17th century Europe, leaders in the Catholic Church did not exult at the prospect of increased productivity at the bottom of a warm cuppa. So they asked Pope Clement VIII to declare coffee "the bitter invention of Satan." The pontiff, not one to jump to conclusions, had coffee brought before him, sipped, and made the call. "This Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it," he declared, the (perhaps apocryphal) story goes. Which is all to say: Sometimes, people are so scared of change, they get things very wrong.

For more than a year, Tesla has defended its semiautonomous Autopilot as a vital, life-saving feature. CEO Elon Musk has lambasted journalists who write about crashes involving the system. "It's really incredibly irresponsible of any journalists with integrity to write an article that would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe," he said during a tumultuous earnings call this week. "Because people might actually turn it off, and then die." This wasn't the first time Musk has made this argument about Autopilot, which keeps the car in its lane and a safe distance from other vehicles but requires constant human oversight, and has been involved in two fatal crashes in the US. "Writing an article that's negative, you're effectively dissuading people from using autonomous vehicles, you're killing people," he said on an October 2016 conference call.

Google argues that driverless cars improve highway safety while enabling lower federal spending on roads, buses, and trains. The government should support driverless cars because they will allow it to spend less on roads, public transport, and parking, Google will tell US law makers on Tuesday. A month after Google recorded its first own-fault accident in a self-driving car, Chris Urmson, head of the project at Google, will urge senators to allow the US Department of Transport to clear a path for the vehicles because they're safer and will ultimately cost the government less. Exactly what impact driverless cars will have on roads is still being debated. Some believe they will cut congestion due to the potential for car-sharing.

Insurance Institute staff are driving vehicles with driver assistance systems to evaluate how they perform in everyday driving scenarios. Whether we realize it or not – and like it or not -- we are taking part in an experiment, sharing roads with vehicles that have drivers' assistance technology to keep cars from straying out of their lanes and to make them brake if the driver isn't paying attention. We are beginning to share roads with self-driving vehicles, too. The goal is to make us safer. But there are unanswered questions: How do these systems work in everyday driving and in relation to what humans expect?

Google's gumdrop-shaped autonomous car looks like something you'd see in a Pixar movie, a cute and cuddly machine that makes the future look fun--until it ambushes you in a crosswalk, traps you like a fly in a web, and whisks you away. That horrific scenario comes to mind reading Google's recently approved patent for what amounts to slathering its cars in glue. To be fair, this has less to do with collecting humans than protecting them. Autonomous vehicles absolutely will reduce collisions and fatalities, but even the most ardent advocates concede one of them eventually will hit a pedestrian. Google engineers believe coating the front of a car with adhesive could prevent someone from bouncing onto the windshield, sliding under the wheels, or flying into the air and landing in the road.