Susan Horton cuts open ice pops for her daughters at home in Cotati, California, in July 2024. Pregnant with her fifth child, Susan Horton had a lot of confidence in her parenting abilities. Then she ate a salad from Costco: an "everything" chopped salad kit with poppy seeds. When she went to the hospital to give birth the next day, she tested positive for opiates. Horton told doctors that it must have been the poppy seeds, but she couldn't convince them it was true.

Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous development for comparison to rigid locomotion. This article presents a soft legged robot platform, Horton, and a feedback control system with safety guarantees on some aspects of its operation. The robot is constructed using a series of soft limbs, actuated by thermal shape memory alloy (SMA) wire muscles, with sensors for its position and its actuator temperatures. A supervisory control scheme maintains safe actuator states during the operation of a separate controller for the robot's pose. Experiments demonstrate that Horton can lift its leg and maintain a balancing stance, a precursor to locomotion. The supervisor is verified in hardware via a human interaction test during balancing, keeping all SMA muscles below a temperature threshold. This work represents the first demonstration of a safety-verified feedback system on any soft legged robot.

Artificial intelligence stands to change wildfire recovery and containment forever during a time when fires in the West are doing things that seasoned firefighters of 40 years have never seen. "You could not hire enough firefighters," stated Brent VanKeulen, deputy director of the Western Fire Chiefs Association (WFCA). You can't get enough dozers on the ground to meet the challenge of what we're facing now." Over the last year, public safety teams have tested a new tool in western states like California and Oregon, and results have been promising. The tests involve imagery taken by a 360 camera both before and after a fire. Thanks to cloud computing and machine learning, that visual product can be transformed into mapping data that shows "what was damaged, where it was damaged and how badly it was damaged," said David Blankinship, chief technology adviser with WFCA. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the tool is the resources it saves.

Artificial intelligence stands to change wildfire recovery and containment forever during a time when fires in the West are doing things that seasoned firefighters of 40 years have never seen. "You could not hire enough firefighters," stated Brent VanKeulen, deputy director of the Western Fire Chiefs Association (WFCA). You can't get enough dozers on the ground to meet the challenge of what we're facing now." Over the last year, public safety teams have tested a new tool in western states like California and Oregon, and results have been promising. The tests involve imagery taken by a 360-degree camera both before and after a fire. Thanks to cloud computing and machine learning, that visual product can be transformed into mapping data that shows "what was damaged, where it was damaged and how badly it was damaged," said David Blankinship, chief technology adviser with WFCA. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the tool is the resources it saves.

Today, consumers can buy cameras powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that recognize a person at their front door. But they don't have anything close to a robot that can tie their shoelaces. Why? Simply put, because most machine learning algorithms available today in AI applications don't learn very well. Thanks to a branch of AI called unsupervised learning, however, that's about to change. Most machine learning uses a technique called supervised learning.

Forbes' Jillian D'Onfro leads a panel of AI industry experts (left to right) Marco Casalaina, Salesforce, Chuck Ganapathi, Tact.ai, and Lorrissa Horton, Cisco. Today's voice-powered AI assistant has many names--Siri, Alexa, Cortana--but as this developing technology becomes ubiquitous in both consumer and enterprise environments, Chuck Ganapathi has a suggestion for his industry colleagues: "Let's not pretend it's a human," the founder and CEO of Tact said Monday during the Voice AI in the Enterprise panel at the Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, taking a jab at Google's eerily lifelike Duplex AI system. What's more, he said, the enterprise must be careful not to hark back to the secretary pools of old: Voice assistants at work shouldn't automatically sound like they're women. His company intentionally gave its AI-based customer-relationship management system a gender-free name and gives users multiple voice options at setup. He also commended the work of a European agency called Virtue that launched the first "genderless" digital assistant voice this spring.

Artificial intelligence, which is bringing us everything from self-driving cars to personalized ads on the web, is also invading the world of medicine. In radiology, this technology is increasingly helping doctors in their jobs. A computer program that assists doctors in diagnosing strokes garnered approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year. Another that helps doctors diagnose broken wrists in X-ray images won FDA approval on May 24. One particularly intriguing line of research seeks to train computers to diagnose one of the deadliest of all malignancies, pancreatic cancer, when the disease is still readily treatable.

It sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie: A charismatic billionaire wants to build a network of high tech tunnels beneath America's cities and slay an enemy in the process. In addition to building electric vehicles, launching rockets, and colonizing Mars, Musk wants to reinvent tunneling and destroy soul-sucking traffic. Just how Musk's latest venture, the wonderfully named Boring Company, will do that remains rather opaque, perhaps even to Musk himself. "We're just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent," he said in February, with the nonchalance of someone ordering a latte. "We have no idea what we're doing--I want to be clear about that."

The processing required to prepare unstructured data for analysis can be cumbersome and prone to error. That's why companies should do more to organize their data before it is ever collected. Unstructured data -- data that is not organized in a predefined way, such as text -- is now widely available. But structure must be added to the data to make it useable for analysis, which means significant processing. That processing can be a problem.

Investment in the sector is declining, but tech developments are accelerating. According to data from Thomson Reuters, U.S. fintech investments reached $4.27 billion in 2016, which was down 30 percent from 2015. The amount of investment declined in large part because of uncertainty about the presidential election and smaller deal sizes, according to data provider CB Insights and consultancy KPMG. Payments and lending remain the leading fintech subsectors across the globe, say CB Insights and KPMG, and continue to earn considerable attention from venture capital investors despite some signs of market saturation. Other areas, including blockchain, data and analytics, regulatory tech and insurance tech are gaining more attention.