I saw two visions of the future in Los Angeles last weekend. First, a Waymo Jaguar I-PACE pulled over to pick me up on a busy street in downtown L.A., spinning lidar sensors mounted on the hood like a second set of side mirrors. We inched comfortably through stop-and-go Saturday afternoon traffic and made an impressive left turn ahead of two lanes of oncoming cars as I said my prayers in the passenger seat. On the other hand, the robot lost its nerve trying to turn right across a crosswalk. As pedestrians cleared and the light turned from green to yellow to red, the Waymo remained fixed to the spot.

In 2017, when John Callery joined the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention organization, as its director of technology, he had a galvanizing, if not daunting, mandate from the newly appointed CEO, Amit Paley: "Rethink everything." "I think my computer had tape on it when I started on the first day," says Callery, who's now the Trevor Project's VP of technology. "In a lot of nonprofits, the investments are not made in technology. The focus is on the programmatic areas, not on the tech as a way of driving programmatic innovation." The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 as a 24-hour hotline for at-risk LGBTQ youth.

Since he was a child, Derek Paley has been captivated by how shoals of fish move fluidly as a cohesive group, almost as if a single organism. As the Willis H. Young Jr. Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education and director of the Collective Dynamics and Control Laboratory at the University of Maryland, Paley is applying his long-standing source of inspiration to the cooperative control of autonomous vehicles. Fish are particularly interesting for Paley because of their sensory system. He explains that fish have a lateral line system, which is a series of sensors located on their exterior, sometimes appearing on their side as a stripe. With their lateral line sense, fish can perceive the direction and speed of nearby water flow, as well as predators and other obstacles.

Machine learning's trendy tech is powering products all over Silicon Valley, but Chicagoans are using artificial intelligence in a more practical sense, Uptake's Adam McElhinney says. "I see a big contrast between the way Chicago companies are using machine learning and the way some of the Silicon Valley companies are maybe using machine learning," said McElhinney, vice president of data science at the predictive-analytics startup that targets construction, mining and other industrial sectors. "If you look at these companies, they're all solving big, tangible problems for customers -- not trying to sell a 99-cent iPhone app." He joined representatives from Avant, Civis Analytics, Groupon and Narrative Science Thursday evening for "Data-Driven Chicago," an event at Groupon's headquarters where each company shared how they're using machine learning to make sense of massive amounts of data. Affordable sensors -- along with improved connectivity and data storage capacity -- are creating opportunities across Uptake's verticals, McElhinney said.