Volkswagen has shown off the sporty side of its electric technology by setting an all-time record in the annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado. Former Le Mans winner Romain Dumas took the I.D. R Pikes Peak prototype up in a time of seven minutes 57.148 seconds on the 19.9 km mountain road on Sunday. That was 16 seconds quicker than the 2013 record set by fellow-Frenchman Sebastien Loeb in a 3.2 litre V6 engined Peugeot 208. The radical car was fuelled by glycerol, a sugar alcohol often used as a sweetener in food. Former Le Mans winner Romain Dumas took the I.D. R Pikes Peak prototype up in a time of seven minutes 57.148 seconds on the 19.9 km mountain road on Sunday.

Carnegie Mellon University will become the first U.S. college to offer an undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence (AI) this fall, following careful consideration about where the fledgling field is going and how the institution can use this opportunity to promote social responsibility around AI. The Pittsburgh-based university already offers nearly two dozen courses in AI and related fields, said Reid Simmons, a Carnegie Mellon research professor who is currently on leave for the year while he works at the National Science Foundation. Simmons, who will be teaching classes in the AI degree program this fall, cited the university's existing educational and research focus on AI as the reason Carnegie Mellon has decided to offer a major in the burgeoning field. "Students have come here interested in learning more about artificial intelligence, and there really wasn't any structured way for them to do it," Simmons told EdScoop. "They could take courses here and there, they could take certain concentrations, they could do an additional major in robotics or a minor in machine learning, but the full-fledged curriculum wasn't there."

What the research seems to suggest, then, is that much of the work people most want to delegate to robots involved tasks that they both dislike and have to spend a significant amount of time doing. This is an issue which AI could prove a major boon to in terms of solving. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, less than 5% of jobs could actually be completely replaced by technology in the next 40 years, but over 60% of all work activities – including repetitive admin work – could be automated in that same period, freeing up staff to concentrate on more useful aspects of business. Potentially this could offer a major productivity boost, something the UK in particular is in dire need of amid sluggish economic growth in the lead up to Brexit.

Learn about the latest technical advancements in natural language processing, as well as real-life applications of the technology to solve challenges in business and society. Topics include: automated question and answering; computers learning to communicate; multimodal dialogue technologies; deeptext; data-driven language understanding and labelling topics using neural networks.

The Terminator was written to frighten us; WALL-E was written to make us cry. Robots can't do the terrifying or heartbreaking things we see in movies, but still the question lingers: What if they could? Granted, the technology we have today isn't anywhere near sophisticated enough to do any of that. At the heart of those discussions lies the question: can machines become conscious? Could they even develop -- or be programmed to contain -- a soul?

When it comes to sports betting, most people lose. But during the 2014 World Cup, a team of statisticians beat the bookmakers. They correctly predicted Germany -- their home country and 6-to-1 underdogs -- as the final champions and raked in a 30 percent return with bets placed on regular matches. This year, the team, led by Andreas Groll of Germany's Technical University of Dortmund, is back with an artificial intelligence program with even better odds. As of Friday morning, it had correctly predicted 15 of 24 games -- the winners, the losers and those who tied. As for the ultimate victor, their new model has picked Spain, but only if Germany falters before the final.

We work with vast quantities of travel data (127,000 journeys are taken by our customers every day) to enhance the travel experience with new, smart innovations. These innovations are designed to help customers in many ways, from saving them money to helping them find the best ticket for their journey in a quick and easy way. One of the projects my team has been working on recently is enhanced disruption notifications for our customers. Soon to launch in beta in our voice app, enhanced disruption notifications use machine learning and natural language processing to'read' the rail operators' Twitter feeds, analyse them and share relevant contextual journey updates matched to the individual traveller. It's a first for the rail industry in the UK and we're really excited to launch it.

When we encounter artificial intelligence in the media, it's often discussed at extremes. At one end, there are films, books, games and even news commentary that paint a picture of a world-ending intelligence. At the other end, people picture algorithms so powerful they can solve every major problem facing mankind. In reality, the capabilities for AI lie somewhere in between. For example, some of Elsevier's products use machine-learning driven image identification to better diagnose life-threatening illnesses – but these are tools are designed to aid the deductive work of human experts, not replace them.

Flocks of robotic birds are taking to the skies of China equipped with high-tech surveillance technology, according to a report. The so-called "spy bird" programme, first reported by the South China Morning Post, is already in operation in at least five provinces and provides another tendril in the country's already advanced surveillance network. The dove-like drones are being developed by researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in the Shaanxi province, who have previously worked on stealth fighter jets used by China's airforce. One of the researchers involved said the roll out of the technology was still in its early stages. "The scale is still small," said Yang Wenqing, an associate professor at the university's School of Aeronautics who worked on the programme.

The robot arm is performing a peculiar kind of Sisyphean task. It hovers over a glistening pile of cooked chicken parts, dips down, and retrieves a single piece. A moment later, it swings around and places the chunk of chicken, ever so gently, into a bento box moving along a conveyor belt. This robot, created by a San Francisco–based company called Osaro, is smarter than any you've seen before. The software that controls it has taught it to pick and place chicken in about five seconds--faster than your average food-processing worker.