Ford has a vision for the future, and it's apparently one where an army of autonomous vans and drones deliver things to your doorstep. The company used VR to put visitors at Mobile World Congress in the shoes of a dinner party host missing key ingredients. Using a service called "Autolivery," the woman places an order from an app. Her package is loaded into an self-driving van, and a drone flies it up to a landing pad on the balcony on her 30th floor apartment. Autolivery was developed by Shanghai-based Ford designers Euishik Bang, James Kuo and Chelsia Lau for the company's Last Mile Mobility Challenge.

Explosive growth in data and availability of cheap computing resources have sparked increasing interest in Big learning, an emerging subfield that studies scalable machine learning algorithms, systems, and applications with Big Data. Bayesian methods represent one important class of statistic methods for machine learning, with substantial recent developments on adaptive, flexible and scalable Bayesian learning. This article provides a survey of the recent advances in Big learning with Bayesian methods, termed Big Bayesian Learning, including nonparametric Bayesian methods for adaptively inferring model complexity, regularized Bayesian inference for improving the flexibility via posterior regularization, and scalable algorithms and systems based on stochastic subsampling and distributed computing for dealing with large-scale applications.

BARCELONA, SPAIN--Coca-Cola is one of the most beloved brands in the world and is known for creating some of the best work in the advertising industry. But can an AI bot replace a creative? Mariano Bosaz, the brand's global senior digital director, wants to find out. Speaking to Adweek at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, Bosaz said that he's partly in Barcelona this week to get a better feel for how brands can use artificial intelligence because he's interested in swapping in robots for humans that crank out ads. "Content creation is something that we have been doing for a very long time--we brief creative agencies and then they come up with stories that they audio visualize and then we have 30 seconds or maybe longer," Bosaz said. "In content, what I want to start experimenting with is automated narratives."

Mads Mikkelsen recently talked about the time "Death Stranding" creator Hideo Kojima explained to him the plot of the upcoming open world action video game. The "Hannibal" actor also reacted to the rumor that Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone could be part of the Kojima Productions' project. According to Metal Gear Informer, a video showing Mikkelsen's attendance at the Saudi Comic Con in Jeddah in mid-February recently surfaced online. In the video, the Danish actor apparently talks about his involvement in the production of the video game and other stuff related to it. At one point in the video, Mikkelsen tells the audience about the time Kojima explained to him what "Death Stranding" is really about. Unfortunately, because the explanation Kojima gave was so elaborate, he got lost while listening to it.

On Monday, Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of self-driving-truck startup Otto and now head of Uber's autonomous vehicle program, was interviewed on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Surprisingly, the interviewer didn't mention the controversy that's rocking the autonomous vehicle world: the accusation by Google that Otto, which Uber acquired last year, was built, in part, on patented trade secrets stolen by Levandowski. Before starting Otto, Levandowski was a senior engineer in Google's self-driving vehicle team. In October, I interviewed Levandowski for a Forbes cover story about Uber. Part of the interview focused on how self-driving technology has morphed from a seemingly crazy idea spun up by Google into something scores of car companies, and even startups like Otto, are capable of implementing.

Dyson, the technology company, is to undergo a dramatic expansion in the UK by opening a new 210 hectare (517 acre) campus as part of a £2.5bn investment that will support its development of new battery technologies and robotics. The company, led by the billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson, will increase its UK geographical footprint tenfold by developing the campus on a former Ministry of Defence airfield and intends to at least double its workforce of 3,500 over the next few years. The new facility in Hullavington, Wiltshire is part of a £2.5bn investment by Dyson in new technologies and will focus on research and development. The size of the campus and the company's work on batteries, robotics and artificial intelligence will increase speculation that Dyson is developing a driverless electric car. Theresa May said said: "This investment is a vote of confidence in our modern industrial strategy and our determination to cement the UK's position as a world leader in high-tech engineering. "Dyson's exporting strength and commitment to creating jobs in Britain is a real success story that demonstrates the opportunity that our plan to create a truly global Britain can present." The expansion plan is a boost for the government amid growing speculation about the future of other key industrial facilities. BMW is considering building its new electric Minis in Germany rather than its factory at Oxford. There are also concerns that jobs could be lost at Vauxhall's factories in Ellesmere Port and Luton if PSA Group, the owner of Peugeot, completes a deal to buy parent company General Motors' European business. Dyson was one of the most prominent business leaders to publicly support Brexit before the referendum in June. His company has developed from a business specialising in bagless vacuum cleaners into a fast-growing multinational technology company selling bladeless fans, air purifiers, hand-dryers, hairdryers and robotic vacuum cleaners. Dyson said he did not understand claims that the UK is suffering from economic uncertainty and that the prospect of the country leaving the EU had not dissuaded him from investing. "We have got the opportunity to export globally – Europe is only 15% of global trade and declining.

Conferences, workshops and other meetings provide opportunities to learn where the jobs and technology is headed and a chance to learn and practice the skills necessary to keep up. Why you should attend: The focus of this Summit is "the rise of intelligent machines to make sense of data." "Deep-dive workshops" will give attendees the opportunity to explore specific topics, from natural language processing to pattern recognition. Speakers include development engineers and scientists from top Bay Area companies such as Flickr, Airbnb and Pandora. Why you should attend: The MLconf, which began as a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University's GraphLab, focuses on solutions to organizing and analyzing large, noisy data sets.

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans? This is not an entirely new question. People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.

Many of the world's biggest websites have stopped working because of a problem at Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the division of the retail giant that provides the infrastructure for much of the internet, appears to have broken. That means that all of the companies and websites that rely on its services – many of the world's biggest websites, like Imgur and Medium, as well as professional tools like SoundCloud and Trello – have stopped working at the same time. Amazon says that the S3 service hasn't broken but is just experiencing a higher "error rate" than usual. But the problems mean that the websites that rely on its services can't get online all the same. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

It's rare that software engineers are lauded as the heroes of anything, but Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov wants to change that. Sverdlov, formerly CEO of Russian mobile operator Yota, set up Roborace last year with the goal of organizing street races that will pit self-driving cars against one another. "In the racing environment engineers are usually in the background. Here the software engineers are the heroes," he said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Designing and building high-performance race cars is horrendously expensive, but Sverdlov wants Roborace to be an intellectual competition, not a financial one.