Los Angeles commuters: Don't be alarmed, but driverless taxis may soon become a more common site on local streets. On March 1, state regulators gave Waymo, the self-driving taxi company owned by Google's parent, Alphabet, the green light to expand its robotaxi service to Los Angeles County, clearing the way for the company's expansion into one of the biggest markets in the country. While local transportation agencies deal with day-to-day traffic operations in their respective jurisdictions, the California Public Utilities Commission oversees the regulation of driverless vehicles across the state, superseding local governments. Waymo has not disclosed a timeline for when its service will become widely available, but a handful of Waymo vehicles are already roaming about the county, including around the USC campus, as part of its ongoing testing and promotion program. Under its new approval agreement, Waymo's driverless fleet can operate in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, East Los Angeles, Compton and many more locales.

Making sense of familiar yet new situations typically involves making generalizations about causal schemas, stories that help humans reason about event sequences. Reasoning about events includes identifying cause and effect relations shared across event instances, a process we refer to as causal schema induction. Statistical schema induction systems may leverage structural knowledge encoded in discourse or the causal graphs associated with event meaning, however resources to study such causal structure are few in number and limited in size. In this work, we investigate how to apply schema induction models to the task of knowledge discovery for enhanced search of English-language news texts. To tackle the problem of data scarcity, we present Torquestra, a manually curated dataset of text-graph-schema units integrating temporal, event, and causal structures. We benchmark our dataset on three knowledge discovery tasks, building and evaluating models for each. Results show that systems that harness causal structure are effective at identifying texts sharing similar causal meaning components rather than relying on lexical cues alone. We make our dataset and models available for research purposes.

When it comes to artificial intelligence healthcare solutions, it's important to manage expectations for consumers and users. "The first thing that's important to realise is that AI isn't magic," said David Champeaux, chief growth officer, Cherish Health, during a panel at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 Europe Digital Conference. Though AI can improve people's lives, said Champeaux, developers and stakeholders shouldn't overstate its capabilities. The panel, 'AI Solutions for Consumers', was moderated by Orcha cofounder Tim Andrews and featured Medical Realities cofounder and Chief Medical Officer Prof Shafi Ahmed, ResApp Health CEO Tony Keating, Skinvision business development director Gavin Matthews, and IESO Digital Health Chief AI Officer Valentin Tablan. Champeaux noted that AI tools can, and should, be designed in ways to augment or facilitate an existing routine. To that end, he stressed that tools should be designed to fit the life of a user, not the other way around.

There might be a lot of hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But communications provider AT&T is a believer -- and is transforming its business with the help of these technologies. "Our mission at the chief data office is to data power AT&T through data insights and evolving technologies such as AI and ML," said Kim Keating, vice president of data science at the company. "This allows us to leverage vast amounts of data to provide insights and answers to critical business questions" affecting the company. One are where the company is leveraging these technologies is in selecting retail store formats.

There are almost limitless possibilities when it comes to 3D printing. Now, researchers have come up with a fast and easy way to print palm-sized models of individual human brains, presumably in a bid to advance scientific endeavours, but also because, well, that's pretty neat. In theory, creating a 3D printout of a human brain has been done before, using data from MRI and CT scans. But as MIT graduate Steven Keating found when he wanted to examine his own brain following his surgery to remove a baseball-sized tumour, it's a slow, cumbersome process that doesn't reveal any important areas of interest. MRI and CT scans produce images with so much detail that objects of interest need to be isolated from surrounding tissue and converted into surface meshes in order to be printed.

Brisbane, Australia-based ResApp is planning to re-do its big US trial soon, but in the meantime the smartphone respiratory diagnosis company is continuing to collect data in its native country. The company released data yesterday from a clinical study of more than 1,300 adult patients at Joondalup Health Campus in Perth and Wesley Hospital in Brisbane. While the company's previous studies have focused on a particular condition, this is the first real-world study of patients with a wide variety of diagnoses. Patients presented with a range of respiratory conditions, including some with no condition at all. "Delivering accurate results within an adult intended use population is an excellent step forward, further demonstrating that ResApp's algorithms can be applied effectively in a group of patients with a very broad range of respiratory illnesses," Tony Keating, CEO and managing director of ResApp Health, said in a statement.

May 4, 2017 --Imagine: At the push of a button a team of machines jumps into action, taking a digital blueprint and transforming an empty lot into one with a physical home in just days. They finish on time, on budget, and with zero waste. This Jetsons-like vision of an automated future has come largely true for car manufacturing. Now engineers hope buildings will be next. From Apis Cor's 3-D printed house to the MIT Media Lab's new multipurpose robotic arm, startups and research teams alike aim to spark a digital revolution in an analog industry that has thus far proved resistant to disruption.

The future of construction just got a little bit more real. Researchers at MIT have created a mobile robot that can 3-D-print an entire building in a matter of hours -- a technology that could be used in disaster zones, on inhospitable planets or even in our proverbial backyards. Though the platform described in the journal Science Robotics is still in early stages, it could offer a revolutionary tool for the construction industry and inspire more architects to rethink the relationship of buildings to people and the environment. Current construction practices typically involve bricklaying, wood framing and concrete casting – technologies that have been around for decades in some cases, and centuries in others. Homes and office buildings are often built in the same boxy, cookie-cutter-like templates, even though the environment from one area to another may change dramatically.

In just half a day, a new type of robot built an igloo-shaped building half the diameter of the U.S. Capitol dome--all by itself. In the future, such autonomous machines could assemble entire towns, create wacky Dr. Seuss–like structures, and even prepare the moon for its first human colony. "It's an impressive project," says Matthias Kohler, an architect who studies autonomous construction at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, but was not involved in the work. People have experimented with many approaches to autonomous construction, and the scientists--a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) materials science and design focused Mediated Matter lab in Cambridge--weighed them all before designing their robot. Should their robot manufacture prefabricated parts in a distant factory?

Need a building customized for a particular site quickly? Researchers say a 3D printer may be the answer -- and could reduce the cost to boot. Researcher Steven Keating and colleagues write in this week's Science Robotics a 3D system could reduce construction costs while speeding the process, incorporating different materials and densities as the process moves forward to produce optimal combinations of strength and other properties. "Contemporary construction techniques are slow, labor-intensive, dangerous, expensive, and constrained to primarily rectilinear forms, often resulting in homogenous structures built using materials sourced from centralized factories," the researchers said. Instead, they propose a digital construction platform, an "automated construction system capable of customized on-site fabrication of architectural-scale structures using real-time environmental data for process control."