Like the city that hosts the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) there is a lot of noise on the show floor. Sifting through the lights, sounds and people can be an arduous task even for the most experienced CES attendees. Hidden past the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) is a walkway to a tech oasis housed in the Westgate Hotel. This new area hosting SmartCity/IoT innovations is reminiscent of the old Eureka Park complete with folding tables and ballroom carpeting. The fact that such enterprises require their own area separate from the main halls of the LVCC and the startup pavilions of the Sands Hotel is an indication of how urbanization is being redefined by artificial intelligence.

Trials have begun at Haneda Airport in Tokyo on next-generation self-driving electric wheelchairs to help elderly and other people get to boarding gates more easily. Japan Airlines aims to start using self-driving wheelchairs as early as the business year that starts next April. Currently, JAL offers manual wheelchairs at airports across the country. The self-driving wheelchairs JAL aims to introduce are designed to allow users to move without any escort. They automatically return to their home positions after use, making it unnecessary for workers to go and collect them.

Autonomous vehicle technology often prompts discussions about profit, safety, efficiency, jobs, and more. But this innovation can change millions of lives today without introducing a single car to the road. Elizabeth Jameson (@jamesonfineart) is a health policy analyst and an artist who uses neurotechnology, science and art to shift the narrative of chronic illness. Catherine Monahon is an art educator and project manager who works with individuals, small businesses, and nonprofits to tell their stories through various media. I have a progressive disease, multiple sclerosis, which has now rendered me quadriplegic; I no longer have use of my hands or legs.

Over the past few months, CSAIL's (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) self-driving wheelchair has become a familiar sight around the MIT halls. It's a nice little rolling advertisement for the lab's work -- and more importantly, it's a great opportunity to test the mobility device in a real world setting. As students wander by in groups, deep in conversation or face down in their smartphones, their paths are unpredictable and collisions are a very real possibility. This kind of real world testing is exactly why the chair exists in the first place. It's hard to test autonomous cars in out on the streets.

Singapore and MIT have been at the forefront of autonomous vehicle development. First, there were self-driving golf buggies. Now, leveraging similar technology, MIT and Singaporean researchers have developed and deployed a self-driving wheelchair at a hospital. Spearheaded by Daniela Rus, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, this autonomous wheelchair is an extension of the self-driving scooter that launched at MIT last year -- and it is a testament to the success of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART, a collaboration between researchers at MIT and in Singapore. Rus, who is also the principal investigator of the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group, says this newest innovation can help nurses focus more on patient care as they can get relief from logistics work which includes searching for wheelchairs and wheeling patients in the complex hospital network.

Singapore is pushing for businesses to develop an autonomous wheelchair that'll convey people around without instruction. The announcement came from Mark Lim, the official in charge of the country's digital services and commercial development division. According to GovInsider, the project is going to run until March 2017 and will harness computer vision, robotics and machine learning to ferry patients around hospitals. The report quotes Lim saying that "we have limited health care workers," and that "nurses are more precious in doing their work [...] than pushing them around in the wheelchair." Singapore GDS is building autonomous wheelchairs!