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The United States National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model X car. On March 23, a Tesla car crashed into a freeway divider, killing the driver, causing a fire and shutting down two lanes of Highway 101 near Mountain View, Calif. It’s not clear if Tesla’s automated control system, Autopilot, was active at the time of the crash, the NTSB said in a tweet

This investigation comes shortly after a fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Arizona prompted the NTSB to send over a field team. According to the NTSB’s most recent update, the team was meeting with representatives from Uber, the NHTSA and Tempe Police Department. The department also said it was gathering and collecting information about the test vehicle’s technology, the pedestrian and the safety driver.

Last year, the NTSB looked into a 2016 accident involving Tesla’s Autopilot system in Florida. The NTSB partially faulted Tesla for the fatal crash, saying the system operated as intended but that the driver’s inattentiveness, due to over-reliance on the Autopilot system, resulted in the accident.

Tesla was not immediately available for comment.

Udacity is hosting its annual Intersect conference this week, and the online learning platform is introducing some new programs and features for students at the event. Those include two new ways for students to practice and hone their practical skills – in both real and virtual worlds.

For robotics education, Udacity is teaming up with robotics and automation specialists KUKA and the Karslruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) to debut the KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab at KIT. This is a special lab which will allow students to put working code on real industrial robots in a university lab environment via a web interface to validate their work.

Students will first run their code in simulation before moving on to test it on the robots themselves, but it’s an invaluable step in being able to develop the skills necessary to build and program robots for use in the real world, and one that’s tricky to come by in a virtual learning environment.

Meanwhile, students in Udacity’s autonomous car and flying vehicle programs will be able to test their programming and software, too, but in a virtual environment called “Udacity Universe.” It’s obviously trickier to provide real-world experience in either of these areas, so Udacy has created a shared virtual environment where students will control automated car and fleets of flying vehicles, all interaction in concert with a simulated world populated by virtual people and other objects.

Udacity is working together with Unity and drone delivery company Zipline to build this virtual interactive environment, and its ultimate goal is to provide a system-level simulation that should provide some idea of how these things will work when implemented in the real world. That should give students the opportunity to work in a virtual proving ground that’s more rich, complex and full of edge cases than any single purpose simulator can be on its own.

In online education, real-world experience can be one of the most challenging things to provide, especially in areas of advanced technology where there isn’t that much hands-on experience to be had anywhere. Udacity’s getting around this in creative ways, and these are two examples.

Udacity is hosting its annual Intersect conference this week, and the online learning platform is introducing some new programs and features for students at the event. Those include two new ways for students to practice and hone their practical skills – in both real and virtual worlds.

For robotics education, Udacity is teaming up with robotics and automation specialists KUKA and the Karslruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) to debut the KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab at KIT. This is a special lab which will allow students to put working code on real industrial robots in a university lab environment via a web interface to validate their work.

Students will first run their code in simulation before moving on to test it on the robots themselves, but it’s an invaluable step in being able to develop the skills necessary to build and program robots for use in the real world, and one that’s tricky to come by in a virtual learning environment.

Meanwhile, students in Udacity’s autonomous car and flying vehicle programs will be able to test their programming and software, too, but in a virtual environment called “Udacity Universe.” It’s obviously trickier to provide real-world experience in either of these areas, so Udacy has created a shared virtual environment where students will control automated car and fleets of flying vehicles, all interaction in concert with a simulated world populated by virtual people and other objects.

Udacity is working together with Unity and drone delivery company Zipline to build this virtual interactive environment, and its ultimate goal is to provide a system-level simulation that should provide some idea of how these things will work when implemented in the real world. That should give students the opportunity to work in a virtual proving ground that’s more rich, complex and full of edge cases than any single purpose simulator can be on its own.

In online education, real-world experience can be one of the most challenging things to provide, especially in areas of advanced technology where there isn’t that much hands-on experience to be had anywhere. Udacity’s getting around this in creative ways, and these are two examples.

Udacity is intruding three dedicated new nanodegrees (its own accelerated learning program) in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become part of its new School of AI. AI has been a subject Udacity has taught nearly since its inception, beginning over five years ago, and the field has changed a lot since. It’s seen over 8,000 graduates from its nanodegree program, which means that its alumni make up an estimated 3 percent of the world’s total AI engineering pool, according to the company.

Now, it’s intruding an AI Programming with Python nanodegree, as well as a Computer Vision program (which it created with Nvidia and Affective) and a Natural Language Processing nanodegree build in partnership with Amazon Alex and IBM Watson. In addition to the three new focuses courses of study, Udacity is also revamping its core AI Nanodegree to focus on a core curriculum taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

In a few months, Udacity will also debut a new Reinforcement Learning AI program to bring the nanodegree total in the School of AI to four. This was build in partnership with Nvidia, too, as well as with Unity.

This new focus emphasizes the value of the field to the market Udacity servers, and shows where its hiring partner interest lies. AI fundamentals, and these specific areas, are applicable across a range of different product goals and development efforts, and should serve graduates well in a number of different fields.

Udacity is intruding three dedicated new nanodegrees (its own accelerated learning program) in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become part of its new School of AI. AI has been a subject Udacity has taught nearly since its inception, beginning over five years ago, and the field has changed a lot since. It’s seen over 8,000 graduates from its nanodegree program, which means that its alumni make up an estimated 3 percent of the world’s total AI engineering pool, according to the company.

Now, it’s intruding an AI Programming with Python nanodegree, as well as a Computer Vision program (which it created with Nvidia and Affective) and a Natural Language Processing nanodegree build in partnership with Amazon Alex and IBM Watson. In addition to the three new focuses courses of study, Udacity is also revamping its core AI Nanodegree to focus on a core curriculum taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

In a few months, Udacity will also debut a new Reinforcement Learning AI program to bring the nanodegree total in the School of AI to four. This was build in partnership with Nvidia, too, as well as with Unity.

This new focus emphasizes the value of the field to the market Udacity servers, and shows where its hiring partner interest lies. AI fundamentals, and these specific areas, are applicable across a range of different product goals and development efforts, and should serve graduates well in a number of different fields.

Braintree, the division of PayPal that provides payment services to e-commerce and other online businesses, is making its latest move to help raise its game against competitors like Stripe. It is launching a new solution called Extend, a set of tools to integrate Braintree payments more closely and easily with other services that online companies are using alongside basic transactions.

The set of services that are being launched today include integrating loyalty and reward schemes, adding fraud prevention and ‘contextual commerce’ — or the ability to for a merchant to sell an item and take payment on a platform that is not its own.

Extend is a new solution, but not all parts of it are making their debut. Some of the services, such as the contextual commerce option, were already being offered — this is what is used to power Pinterest’s buyable pins, for example.

The launch of Extend is in keeping with how online commerce is evolving. While Amazon has increasingly become a one-stop shop for some people, we’re also seeing a large proliferation of online companies looking to connect with users wherever they happen to be spending the most time, whether that’s on a social media platform, or on a site that caters to interests adjacent to the businesses’s own — and most importantly not necessarily on the company’s own web properties. That has given rise to demands from merchants to have significantly more flexibility in how and and where they can sell goods and services.

Similarly, the fact that there are so many places to buy, and so many people to buy from, has created a much bigger need for companies to figure out the best way of capturing a consumer’s time (and wallet), but also making sure that they are doing this in a way that’s secure and not susceptible to defrauding. All of these are basically edge cases to the core function of selling something, but together, they essentially become an important group of functions that Braintree needs to be able to facilitate better if it hopes to compete.

Indeed, this is also what other payment companies are also increasingly providing to users. Stripe’s “works with” program, for example, is a fairly extensive directory of all the services you can integrate with Stripe’s basic payments offering both to help it all tally up with your back office systems, and to work with other parts of your business.

Braintree is dividing up Extend into three basic categories for now: transaction services, loyalty and reward, and contextual commerce.

Braintree’s business development lead Azita Habibi notes that transaction services focus on back-end functionality that includes being able to run a transaction against a fraud prevention engine, providing a way of efficiently and securely passing payment information into a second database to help increase latency, or merging different payment systems into a single view.

The reward and loyalty program element, meanwhile, is designed to help make it easier for online businesses to work more easily with rewards and loyalty platforms, be they third-party card-based programs, or something that a business is building for itself. “The user’s card information acts as the consumer identifier, and merchants can leverage Braintree Extend to securely share this on the user’s behalf so that purchases are appropriately tracked and rewards accrued,” she notes. Customers already using this include Yelp, which uses Braintree to link up participating merchants with its Yelp Cash Back program to get rebates at the point of sale.

Last of all, contextual commerce — which essentially lets companies embed a check-out in a site or app that is not their own — is meant to be something that helps people buy right when they are considering a purchase. While redirection services may mean you are capturing customers in your own site where you can sell them more, they also lead to a lot of abandonment of sales altogether.

Braintree, the division of PayPal that provides payment services to e-commerce and other online businesses, is making its latest move to help raise its game against competitors like Stripe. It is launching a new solution called Extend, a set of tools to integrate Braintree payments more closely and easily with other services that online companies are using alongside basic transactions.

The set of services that are being launched today include integrating loyalty and reward schemes, adding fraud prevention and ‘contextual commerce’ — or the ability to for a merchant to sell an item and take payment on a platform that is not its own.

Extend is a new solution, but not all parts of it are making their debut. Some of the services, such as the contextual commerce option, were already being offered — this is what is used to power Pinterest’s buyable pins, for example.

The launch of Extend is in keeping with how online commerce is evolving. While Amazon has increasingly become a one-stop shop for some people, we’re also seeing a large proliferation of online companies looking to connect with users wherever they happen to be spending the most time, whether that’s on a social media platform, or on a site that caters to interests adjacent to the businesses’s own — and most importantly not necessarily on the company’s own web properties. That has given rise to demands from merchants to have significantly more flexibility in how and and where they can sell goods and services.

Similarly, the fact that there are so many places to buy, and so many people to buy from, has created a much bigger need for companies to figure out the best way of capturing a consumer’s time (and wallet), but also making sure that they are doing this in a way that’s secure and not susceptible to defrauding. All of these are basically edge cases to the core function of selling something, but together, they essentially become an important group of functions that Braintree needs to be able to facilitate better if it hopes to compete.

Indeed, this is also what other payment companies are also increasingly providing to users. Stripe’s “works with” program, for example, is a fairly extensive directory of all the services you can integrate with Stripe’s basic payments offering both to help it all tally up with your back office systems, and to work with other parts of your business.

Braintree is dividing up Extend into three basic categories for now: transaction services, loyalty and reward, and contextual commerce.

Braintree’s business development lead Azita Habibi notes that transaction services focus on back-end functionality that includes being able to run a transaction against a fraud prevention engine, providing a way of efficiently and securely passing payment information into a second database to help increase latency, or merging different payment systems into a single view.

The reward and loyalty program element, meanwhile, is designed to help make it easier for online businesses to work more easily with rewards and loyalty platforms, be they third-party card-based programs, or something that a business is building for itself. “The user’s card information acts as the consumer identifier, and merchants can leverage Braintree Extend to securely share this on the user’s behalf so that purchases are appropriately tracked and rewards accrued,” she notes. Customers already using this include Yelp, which uses Braintree to link up participating merchants with its Yelp Cash Back program to get rebates at the point of sale.

Last of all, contextual commerce — which essentially lets companies embed a check-out in a site or app that is not their own — is meant to be something that helps people buy right when they are considering a purchase. While redirection services may mean you are capturing customers in your own site where you can sell them more, they also lead to a lot of abandonment of sales altogether.

After declining a summons from a UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating how social media data is being used this morning, it appears that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may end up finally going before Congress to testify amid a wave of privacy debacles, according to a report by CNN.

CNN reports that Zuckerberg has come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify, and that the testimony may come within a matter of weeks amid pressure from lawmakers, the media, and the public. The initial wave of this scandal began last week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired information on more than 50 million Facebook users via an app that accessed that information through the Facebook platform several years ago.

Last week, Zuckerberg said in one of several interviews that, “if it ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.” Clearly, it appears that Congress wants the chief executive officer of the formerly-$500 billion advertising-driven business to be the one to do the explaining amid the increased fallout over the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

While Facebook is not unfamiliar with privacy snafus, this appeared to be one of the final straws, forcing Facebook CEO to issue a sort of non-apology-ish apology — as well as take out full page (in wildly not-very-engaging full text form, weirdly enough) ads in several major newspapers. Zuckerberg in particular has been a face absent in front of Congress, but it appears the pressure from this incident may be too much for the company to handle without getting his face out there in order to neutralize the fallout.

Facebook offered CTO Mike Schroepfer and chief product officer Chris Cox to meet with the UK committee this morning, but Zuckerberg again was absent there. Indeed, it was several days following the Cambridge Analytica reports that Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made a formal statement in the form of Facebook posts, as well as a number of interviews with various media outlets to try to explain themselves out of the situation.

We reached out to Facebook for a comment and will update the post when we hear back.

After declining a summons from a UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating how social media data is being used this morning, it appears that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may end up finally going before Congress to testify amid a wave of privacy debacles, according to a report by CNN.

CNN reports that Zuckerberg has come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify, and that the testimony may come within a matter of weeks amid pressure from lawmakers, the media, and the public. The initial wave of this scandal began last week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired information on more than 50 million Facebook users via an app that accessed that information through the Facebook platform several years ago.

Last week, Zuckerberg said in one of several interviews that, “if it ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.” Clearly, it appears that Congress wants the chief executive officer of the formerly-$500 billion advertising-driven business to be the one to do the explaining amid the increased fallout over the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

While Facebook is not unfamiliar with privacy snafus, this appeared to be one of the final straws, forcing Facebook CEO to issue a sort of non-apology-ish apology — as well as take out full page (in wildly not-very-engaging full text form, weirdly enough) ads in several major newspapers. Zuckerberg in particular has been a face absent in front of Congress, but it appears the pressure from this incident may be too much for the company to handle without getting his face out there in order to neutralize the fallout.

Facebook offered CTO Mike Schroepfer and chief product officer Chris Cox to meet with the UK committee this morning, but Zuckerberg again was absent there. Indeed, it was several days following the Cambridge Analytica reports that Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made a formal statement in the form of Facebook posts, as well as a number of interviews with various media outlets to try to explain themselves out of the situation.

We reached out to Facebook for a comment and will update the post when we hear back.

Apple is bringing its pencil to the masses.

The pencil tool will now work across Apple’s suite of iWork tools — including the popular Pages (document creation) Numbers (its spreadsheet app), and Keynote (for presentations) apps — on the low-cost iPad that Apple first brought to market last year.

At an event today in Chicago, Apple announced its latest iPad, in a bid to challenge the dominant player in the education technology — Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet).

In addition, the company said that Logitech is introducing a $49 pencil stylus called the “crayon” which slashes the cost of the pencil hardware from its previous, $99 price point.