Can Bike Riders and Self-Driving Cars Be Friends? Some cycling advocates are on board with robotaxis. Others see the self-driving car boom as perpetuating auto dependency. Los Angeles is a car city, and it's rarely more obvious than from a vulnerable perch on top of a bicycle . Among big cities in the US, LA has a middling-to-bad reputation for bike riding.

Roblox is rolling out new features aimed at making the platform safer for minors, including a revamped friend system, privacy tools, and age verification services users submit by recording a video selfie. In Roblox's old friend system, players have no distinction between people they know casually or online versus someone they consider a close friend. The platform's new tiered system introduces Connections and Trusted Connections specifically for people that players know and trust. To access Trusted Connections and its benefits, users first need to complete an age verification, which requires them to submit a video selfie. Once they've submitted their video, the company says it's run against an AI-driven "diverse dataset" to get an age estimation.

In Charlie Kaufman's puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It's as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from his table and notices everyone – waiters, diners, perhaps even a passing dog – have his face and voice, has gone global. No one is immune: at one point, the mouth of the narrator, a motivational speaker called Michael Stone, falls from his face into his hands and chatters away all by itself. The guru's improving homilies are so artificially intelligent, predictable and effectively transhuman, that they need no warming body or soul to sustain them. Each puppet is incessantly enjoined by life coaches and other professional fascists to express their individuality. But how can they since they are all the same and have access to the same narrative codes?

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel joins'Fox News Live' to discuss the growing popularity of a new class of weight loss drugs actually meant to treat diabetes and the potential side effects. Getting screened for type 2 diabetes could one day be as simple as speaking into your smartphone. Currently, gauging diabetes risk requires fasting, taking a blood test and waiting days for the results. In an effort to change that, researchers from Klick Applied Sciences in Toronto, Canada, have developed an artificial intelligence model that uses a 10-second voice recording to predict diabetes risk. The AI program was shown to predict the disease with 85% accuracy, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health last month.

Canadian medical researchers have trained a machine-learning AI to accurately predict Type 2 diabetes from just six to 10 seconds of the patient's spoken voice. This was achieved after the model identified 14 acoustic features for differences between non-diabetic and Type 2 diabetic individuals. The AI focused on a set of vocal features, including slight changes in pitch and vocal intensity that the human ears can't hear of doctors, and paired that data with basic health information, including the patient's age, sex, height, and weight. Sex proved to be decisive, the researchers found: The AI can diagnose the disease with 89 percent for women, but slightly less accurately, 86 percent for men. A Canadian firm has trained a machine-learning AI to accurately predict Type 2 diabetes from just six to 10 seconds of a patient's spoken voice.

To mitigate local warming, cities including Milan have wrapped condominium balconies and high-rise facades in expansive vertical gardens. A dense stack of vegetation can help keep a building cool by creating natural shading and releasing moisture into the air, says Theodore Endreny, a professor of environmental resources engineering at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The compact foliage augments the benefits trees and plants naturally provide when planted on sidewalks or roofs, including pollution removal, carbon dioxide sequestration and oxygen production. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Crews of urban arborists certified as tree climbers will be hired to rappel down buildings and maintain these ecosystems as they sprout on more buildings, says Dr. Endreny.

Consumers have come to expect personalization in their shopping experiences, whether using online marketplaces such as Amazon and Etsy or mobile apps such as Gilt or Poshmark. Product recommendations, informed by purchase histories and preferred payment methods, are becoming a standard aspect of digital checkout experiences. Online content subscription purchasing experiences are far different from that ideal in practice, however. Magazines, newspapers, television networks and other content providers typically offer more uniform interfaces that may not consider their customers' geographies, content or payment preferences. The standard approach to conversion that has been representative of the digital content ecosystem -- the paywall -- could be on its way to becoming a thing of the past, according to Trevor Kaufman, CEO of New York City-headquartered Software-as-a-Service firm Piano.io,

In 2015, Dan Kaufman, the director of the information innovation office at the U.S. Department's fabled DARPA lab, began talking to Google about joining the company in some capacity. Maybe he could work on Android. Or take a job at X, the Alphabet moonshot factory formerly known as Google X. And then another possibility came up: ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects), a Google research skunkworks that was "just like DARPA, but in Silicon Valley," as he describes it. His reaction: "That sounds awesome!" At the time, ATAP was even led by Regina Dugan, Kaufman's former boss at DARPA. But not long after he arrived as Dugan's deputy, she abruptly left to start a similar group at Facebook.

In an new column, "Tech-Enabled A2J", we will take a look at how legal start-ups and legal technology innovations are impacting the push toward better Access to Justice for more citizens. Whereas LSOs have found past success in reaching clients through basic tools like texting, they are now moving to more advanced platforms like document automation to better streamline internal processes. Some are even going one step further by embarking on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) projects to determine how they can help address the 86% of civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans that aren't fully resolved. Access to justice starts with literal access: figuring out how clients best receive, digest, and act on legal information. On the lower-tech end, text messaging has proven to be a successful tool for reaching those in need.

At that time, the final contract was expected by the end of the year, and the arrangement was to be open to all member-institutions of Projekt DEAL, which comprises more than 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany. On Thursday (January 9), media messaging from Springer Nature's director of communications, Susie Winter, indeed informed us that "Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world's largest transformative open access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated January 1, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape. "It follows the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two parties on August 22, and is a giant step forward in the OA transition, enabling greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the dissemination of the fruits of German research, for the benefit of researchers everywhere." A full text of the agreement is to be released by the end of this month, and the deal is to be in force through 2022, with an option to renew for one more year, through 2023. The trend represented by the Projekt DEAL library consortium in Germany, Kaufman says, is unmistakable. "Major STM publishers are inking wide-ranging deals with customers on a national or even broader scale," he says. "In April, Elsevier inked an innovative'read and publish' agreement"--referred to as a RAP deal--"with the Norwegian academic community.