Devastated by industrial crisis, America's former "steel city" has reinvented itself as an innovation hub. But today its main challenge is to keep its "One Pittsburgh" promise by ensuring that everybody in its diverse population shares the benefits of new growth. Pittsburgh is back from the brink. A flagship of triumphant industrialisation in the early 20th century, the city has since seen its steel mills decline and then shut down. As the economy lurched from one crisis to another, Pennsylvania's rusting "steel city" became an emblem of decline, like other urban "dead stars" in the rustbelt of America's Middle West. But Pittsburgh never gave up.

Delta Air Lines will implement facial recognition technology at Los Angeles International Airport from Friday, with cameras identifying passengers at a boarding gate with more to be installed after. The move has been met with controversy however, as groups such as Greenpeace call for a federal banning of the technology by law enforcement agencies. Critics say the technology could be used to violate privacy and date, as well as pointing to issues with accuracy for non-white male subjects. A spokeswoman for the coalition of groups, which also includes MoveOn and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the groups also oppose the use of the technology by airlines. 'There is no real oversight for how a private corporation can use our biometric information once they've collected it,' said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future.

The Department of Transportation says it wants to remove barriers to innovation in autonomous car technology. Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption The Department of Transportation says it wants to remove barriers to innovation in autonomous car technology. The Department of Transportation has announced new federal voluntary guidance on the development and use of automated vehicles -- with the goal of "removing unnecessary barriers" to innovation. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said Thursday that the department's 80-page "Automated Vehicles 3.0" guidance "supports the safe, reliable and cost-effective integration of automation into our country's surface transportation systems." The department indicated it was open to changing current standards that require all cars to have steering wheels, brakes and accelerator pedals.

Life is a complex problem. Consider the simple act of moving from point A to point B. Solving for that equation requires synthesizing numerous variables, like speed and obstacles. What if you make it more complicated? Throw in some jaywalking pedestrians, rule-bending cyclists, and, the most erratic variable of all--other drivers. Drivers who are potentially distracted, potentially sleepy, potentially ragey, potentially drunk.

Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) today announced plans to launch a testing environment in which AI researchers and bot makers can share and iterate upon each other's work. While the initial focus is on open-sourcing the dialogue necessary to train machines to carry on conversations, other research on ParlAI will focus on computer vision and fields of AI beyond the natural language understanding required for this task. The combination of smarts from multiple bots and bot-to-bot communication will also be part of research carried out on ParlAI. Learn how developers and brand marketers are using AI to grow their businesses, at MB 2017 on July 11-12 in SF. We cut through the hype to show how marketers are achieving real ROI.

Any day now, Uber will introduce a fleet of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, making this former steel town the world's first city to let passengers hail autonomous vehicles. So with the world watching, what has the city of 306,000 done to prepare for Uber's unprecedented test? The answer is not much. There have been no public service announcements or demonstrations of the technology. Except for the mayor and one police official, no other top city leader has seen a self-driving Uber vehicle operate up close.

In a post on its corporate blog on Monday, eBay explained how it uses machine learning technology to drive innovative new approaches to search experiences. But while that may sound good to the rest of the world, sellers may be wary of marketplaces that tinker with search, which is key to getting exposure to shoppers. Even before eBay started touting its skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning, sellers were concerned over eBay's use of an algorithm to influence which listings would appear higher on the search results page, something known as Best Match - the default sort order of listings. And that's exactly where eBay is concentrating its testing. In Monday's post, eBay wrote, "The largest scale application of machine learning technology at eBay is currently Best Match, the algorithm used to optimize relevance for buyers during their shopping experiences. It is a powerful tool for surfacing deals."

The blockish and slightly dorky computer game Minecraft may turn out to be a great place for humans and AI to learn how to work together. An experimental new version of the game, released by Microsoft researchers this month, can be used to train an AI to perform all sorts of tasks, from crossing bridges to building complex objects. The new platform, called Project Malmo, makes it possible for a learning algorithm to control a Minecraft character that's normally operated by a human player. But it also provides ways for human players and AI agents to work together, and a chat window through which a person can talk with a nascent AI. "In the long run I want to work toward AI that can be taught by any user to help them achieve their goals," says Katja Hoffman, a researcher at Microsoft Cambridge in the U.K. who leads the project. Hoffman, who gave a demo of the software to AI researchers at an academic conference in New York last week, says that human-AI collaboration is a key goal for the project: "We've built in all the capabilities that a researcher would need in order to work toward collaborative AI." Malmo is geared toward testing reinforcement-learning algorithms, a way of training a computer to perform a task by providing simulated rewards.

The'Promobot' (promotional robot) from the company of the same name recently made another attempt to escape its testing grounds, and its creators now believe the bot's memory has to be replaced to remove the machine's "love for freedom." "We've cross-flashed the memory of the robot with serial number IR77 twice, yet it continues to persistently move towards the exit," Ura media outlet cites Promobot's co-founder, Oleg Kivokurtsev, as saying. He noted that other robots don't act the same way and generally toe the line by moving along their planned routes. "We're considering recycling the IR77 because our clients hiring it might not like that specific feature," Kivokurtsev added. The IR77 robot escaped from a testing area in Perm, a city not far from the Urals, and made it on to a busy junction, baffling passersby but also disturbing traffic, the Promobot company reported on June 14.

With everyone from Google to Elon Musk warning about artificial intelligence or AI, this story is especially timely. A Russian robot learning to promote a company's products and'automatic movement profiles' escaped from its testing grounds in Perm, Russia, near the Ural mountains. The machine made it to a busy intersection, snarled traffic, and the police were called. "The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot." The co-founder of the robot's maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency.