Have you ever shopped online for a mattress? Then you know the drill. For weeks after you made a decision, and perhaps even after you took delivery, you still see ads following you around the internet, promoting this mattress manufacturer or that. You think, "if this is a sample of artificial intelligence, then where's the intelligence?" AI and efforts to make digital services more personalized remain "a fairly blunt instrument," says Alan McIntyre, senior managing director, Accenture Global Banking, in an interview with Banking Exchange.

Streaming music revenues surpassed income from the sale of traditional formats for the first time last year, as the booming popularity the service put an end to the era of the CD. Revenue from music fans paying for services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music surged more than 41% to $6.6bn (£4.7bn), accounting for more than 38% of the total global market for recorded music. The sale of physical formats, primarily CDs, fell 5.4% to $5.2bn to account for 30%. It marks a tipping point for the music industry, which has depended on income from CDs to fill record labels' coffers and artists' pockets since the 1980s. CD sales have been in decline for years as the industry was hammered by illegal piracy and failed to make much money as user numbers and margins fell in the early days of streaming.

Motor insurers will in the future have to become more flexible with sharing accident data with analytics companies if they are to improve risk models according to a data firm who have been involved in such an arrangement. Axon Telematics have been working for around a year with MCL Insurance, who target policies for young motorists in Northern Ireland, through what they describe as a "revolutionary" partnership that sees the insurer use data compiled by Axon through black-box analytics and also send back accident information to the data firm as they get it. New Axon CEO Domenico Mariconda says the free passage of information in both directions between insurer and telematics company allows Axon to validate the crashes that have been recorded. More importantly it also provides data to Axon that is going to have an immediate impact on risk profiling and pricing, and get feedback on that data. Mariconda said: "It's really revolutionary because we are probably the only data analytics provider that can have that insight. What that does is feed into a machine learning platform that then refines the model, refines the data that we generate and makes it more effective from an insurance perspective. There is no provider with that setup nowadays."

"Well, if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?" - Obi-Wan Kenobi Fully autonomous robots with humanlike capabilities might yet be some way away, still the realm largely of science fiction, but lawmakers, legal experts and manufacturers are already engaged in debates about the ethical challenges involved in their production and use, and their legal status, their "legal personality": ultimately, whether it's these machines or human beings who should bear responsibility for their actions. There are questions about whether and how much self-learning machines should be taking independent decisions about moral equivalence involving ethical choices which have traditionally been the preserve of humans. At the extreme, for example, can it be right for a machine to decide to kill an enemy combatant that it has identified without resort to human agency? Or is the robot morally no different from a "brainless" weapon? Is there an inherent difference morally between a "sexbot" and a standard, brainless sex toy?

The self-taught and low-cost car park, created by Cambridge Consultants, recognises cars and how those cars appear in parking spaces. The system aptly named Goldeneye, can do this both in the day and night as well as a variety of lighting and weather conditions, including the recent severe snow in the UK, without expensive physical infrastructure. Goldeneye uses a machine vision and deep learning solution developed entirely at Cambridge Consultants, along with the existing security camera and networking infrastructure on-site, to consistently monitor the availability of parking bays. Goldeneye uses 12 cameras to oversee 430 parking spaces and with digital signs at the entrance to the site, the system alerts a 500-strong workforce and visitors to where they can quickly find a parking space. Traditional parking monitoring solutions use sensors for each individual parking space, which can be expensive to maintain and often the business case to justify a large investment in bay sensors does not exist.

Stunning drone footage shows the progress of a £90million'floating' cycle path that will circle Italy's largest lake. The track is currently under construction around Lake Garda, and once finished will stretch for 87 miles. And with parts of the path built off the banks of the lake and in some places even skimming the water, it will make cyclists feel as though they are floating. The stunning footage shows the progress of the cycle track, which is being built around Italy's largest lake The video has been viewed thousands of times with the route already dubbed Europe's most beautiful bike ride Drone footage of the construction of the path has been posted on social media, showing how cyclists will be able to ride near the water's edge. The video has been viewed thousands of times with it already being dubbed Europe's most beautiful bike ride, despite not yet being open yet.

Singapore, South Korea, and Germany topped a recent survey of how countries across the world are dealing with rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology primed to automate millions of jobs in the coming years. Commissioned by ABB, The Economist Intelligence Unit created their Automation Readiness Index using data and interviews with industry stakeholders, economists, government officials, and NGOs. The index ranks countries by how prepared they are for what they call "intelligent automation." There have long been questions about the future of automation and the adoption of AI-backed robotics that can do more than just replicate physical human tasks. Businesses are showing little hesitation in exploring AI, but governments continue to struggle in preparing populations for the coming changes to the workforce.

Advances in artificial intelligence and automation could replace as many as half the nation's financial services workers over the next decade, industry experts say, but it's going to take a big investment to make that happen. James D'Arezzo, CEO of Glendale, Calif.-based Condusiv Technologies, says that's where things are headed. And the process will be complicated. "Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive," he said. Intensive hardware upgrades are often cited as an answer to the problem, but D'Arezzo said that's prohibitively expensive.

The EU has launched a formal investigation into Apple's proposed acquisition of UK music-recognition app Shazam. The European commission announced its in-depth investigation into the deal over concerns that it would harm consumer choice and give Apple an unfair advantage through access to user data, which could aid in poaching customers from rivals. Shazam has been downloaded 1bn times and is used 20m times a day. It is the world's leading music recognition system, able to listen to and identify tracks via a smartphone and then link those tracks to multiple music subscription services, which means it could therefore hold commercially sensitive data on Apple's competitors and their consumers. Noting that Apple Music has become the second-largest music streaming service in Europe, the EC said: "Access to such data could allow Apple to directly target its competitors' customers and encourage them to switch to Apple Music. As a result, competing music streaming services could be put at a competitive disadvantage."

As an important measure to address these points we propose to found a European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems (working title; abbreviated as "ELLIS"), involving the very best European academics while working together closely with basic researchers from industry.