One day a man, who had lost much of his long-term episodic memory, consulted the professor to ask him if there was any way he could help him regain the lost memories. During the previous year, this amnestic man had suffered a stroke in his right cerebral hemisphere. Being righthanded and left-hemisphere specialized for language, he was still able to speak, to read and write: and to understand what was said to him. Besides the usual difficulty in recalling proper names, his main problem involved large gaps in his memory for events that he participated in before the stroke, although he could remember events that occurred after the stroke. For example, many years before his stroke, he had received a high award for an exceptional achievement.

No one said it would be easy. As automakers, developers, and tech companies pump funds into self-driving, electric, and yes, flying cars, there were bound to be some mistakes along the way. This week, we got a look at a few. A few hours into its first day on the job, a Las Vegas autonomous shuttle got in a fender-bender with a (human-driven) truck. Electric vehicles are facing down a threat in the shape of the Republican tax plan, which could do away with federal subsidies--not quite an industry-buster, but grim news for the burgeoning American EV sector.

Are you a veteran of L.A.'s current dating scene? Even in the New Los Angeles, with Lyft and Uber giving us cheaper rides and two-thirds of voters passing Measure M, dating without a car is still playing the game with a serious handicap. "I don't mind that you don't drive," a woman I'd been dating for six months told me last year as she drove us to dinner at Broken Spanish for my birthday. L.A. Affairs chronicles the current dating scene in and around Los Angeles.

Before the meeting, roughly three dozen activists from various groups -- including the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Black Lives Matter and Los Angeles Community Action Network -- stood outside the LAPD's downtown headquarters, denouncing the use of drones by police. The Police Commission should "completely reject LAPD's latest attempt to revive its drone program," said Hamid Khan, founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an anti-surveillance group that frequently criticizes the LAPD. Earlier this year, L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell announced his agency's plans to use a $10,000 drone to help deputies responding to arson scenes, suspected bombs and hostage situations. On July 27, the majority of the Civilian Oversight Commission also expressed their desire for McDonnell to stop flying the drone, citing concerns over surveillance and safety.

It also seems that Los Angeles singles, in their entirety, have been to Machu Picchu. Are you a veteran of L.A.'s current dating scene? Finding this common ground, even in blocks of time, is part of what makes online dating so attractive: It's the verbal foreplay and virtual courtship that often precede anything face-to-face. L.A. Affairs chronicles the current dating scene in and around Los Angeles.

The UC Berkeley-led center, directed by artificial intelligence researcher Stuart Russell, will seek to understand how human values can be built into AI's design, and create a mathematical framework that will help people build AI systems that are beneficial to humanity. Scientists might get around this communication problem by designing artificial intelligence that can watch humans and learn what their values are through their actions (though even that comes with some uncertainty, as humans don't always act in ways aligned with their values, Russell added). The USC center, co-directed by artificial intelligence researcher Milind Tambe and social work scientist Eric Rice, seems to operate in a mindset perpendicular to the one at UC Berkeley: It seeks to harness AI's existing capabilities to solve problems in messy, complicated human contexts. AI also includes a wide range of tools, including machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and game theory (though some may consider game theory part of another discipline, Tambe said).

In proof-of-payment transit systems, passengers are legally required to purchase tickets before entering but are not physically forced to do so. Instead, patrol units move about the transit system, inspecting the tickets of passengers, who face fines if caught fare evading. TRUSTS models the problem of computing patrol strategies as a leader-follower Stackelberg game where the objective is to deter fare evasion and hence maximize revenue. We present an efficient algorithm for computing such patrol strategies and present experimental results using real-world ridership data from the Los Angeles Metro Rail system.

Research in AI within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles is loosely composed of three interacting and cooperating groups: (1) the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at 3677 Boelter Hall, which is concerned mainly with natural language processing and cognitive modelling, (2) the Cognitive Systems Laboratory, at 4731 Boelter Hall, which studies the nature of search, logic programming, heuristics, and formal methods, and (3) the Robotics and Vision Laboratory, at 3532 Boelter Hall, where research concentrates on robot control in manufacturing, pattern recognition, and expert systems for real-time processing.