Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft have made the daily commute a less frustrating part of the day for many. Now a crowd-sourced fleet of 14-passenger vehicles acquired by Ford is promising more. "What Chariot and Ford is looking forward to doing in the next couple of years is to actually make [your commute], believe it or not, the best part of your day," said Ali Vahabzadeh, founder and chief executive officer of Chariot Transit Inc., a Y Combinator-backed startup. At South by SouthWest in Austin, TX, Vahabzadeh claimed that Chariot is reinventing mass-transit by crowd-sourcing new routes in undeserved or overcrowded areas. Vahabzadeh told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile live streaming studio, that Chariot is using Artificial Intelligence and commuter data to finetune rider experiences on-board.

Emerging technologies have the potential to push psychiatry into a new era of evidence-based care, with improved treatment and access. During a presentation about the future of psychiatry at a meeting of mental health professionals, Arshya Vahabzadeh, MD, asked his audience to raise their hands if they were already practicing telepsychiatry. Scattered around the packed convention center ballroom, just a dozen or a few more participants raised their hands. "Telepsychiatry is booming," said Vahabzadeh, the chief medical officer of Brain Power, a neuroscience tech startup that makes artificial intelligence (AI)–based, gamified wearables for people with developmental disorders, like autism, or other brain conditions. More hands would be in the air at the next meeting, he said.

Ford Motor Company is buying San Francisco-based commuter shuttle company Chariot, and partnering with Motivate to grow the number of bikes in the Bay Area. SAN FRANCISCO – Ford Motor Company is buying into the commuter shuttle business, part of an on-going pivot designed to preserve profitability in a world with reduced car ownership. Flanked by the mayors of three Bay Area cities, Ford CEO Mark Fields announced Friday that the Detroit automaker was acquiring startup Chariot for an undisclosed sum. Riders summon Chariot's Ford Transit vans via an app, which helps drivers prioritize busy routes and avoid less traveled ones. The so-called dynamic shuttle service aims to be more efficient than public transportation and less expensive than ride-hailing.

People convey meaning by what they say as well as how they say it: Tone, word choice and the length of a phrase are all crucial cues to understanding what's going on in someone's mind. When a psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person, they listen for these signals to get a sense of their wellbeing, drawing on past experience to guide their judgment. Researchers are now applying that same approach, with the help of machine learning, to diagnose people with mental disorders. In 2015, a team of researchers developed an AI model that correctly predicted which members of a group of young people would develop psychosis--a major feature of schizophrenia--by analyzing transcripts of their speech. This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like "this," "that," and "a," as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next.