We are excited to join forces with Slack to host a series of workshops across Europe. These are one-day workshops, focused on making software that improves the workplace. The workshops will begin with API overviews from both companies during which Watson developer advocate Yacine, will dish out some handy tips on getting started quickly with many of the Watson services. We'll then stay to help you brainstorm, scope, and eventually build out your projects. Everyone can expect to walk away with a working prototype built on top of Slack and Watson Developer Cloud APIs.

A vice-chancellor's call for universities to train undergraduates "to tell the machines what to do" has rekindled debate about how higher education institutions can best prepare their students for the jobs of the future. Michael Spence outlined plans for the University of Sydney to move towards offering four-year degrees with a greater focus on problem-solving and cultural competency as sector leaders around the world debate whether the rise of artificial intelligence and automation will require providers to prioritise specialist skills in areas such as coding, or broad knowledge that will allow graduates to adapt to a changing workplace. The shift towards longer degrees also runs counter to the push in the UK for more two-year degrees, designed to allow students to start their career more quickly and more cheaply. In an interview with Times Higher Education, Dr Spence outlined how Sydney had streamlined its 122 degree programmes – a portfolio based on the supposition that "if you enter a narrow tube that has a job name at one end, at the other end you'll plop out into the job" – to just 25. The rise of AI means that such jobs "may not exist by the time you end up there, or at least won't necessarily have any longevity", Dr Spence said.

A car needs to be able to see its environment before it can drive itself. Don't let pareidolia fool you; its eyes aren't headlights. They are made out of metal, glass, and plastic parts, and they rely on an enormous amount of computing power to remain open. Without them, the car's brain isn't able to make the right decision at the right time. Bosch gave us a chance to briefly explore the German countryside in one of its prototypes to discover how a car sees the world around it.

Dr Stephen Weng in the Division of Primary Care, is giving a talk on Tuesday 5th December called "A gentle introduction to using machine-learning for analysis of large health care datasets". Presentation overview: Machine learning teaches computers to do what comes naturally to humans: learn from experience. These algorithms use computational methods to "learn" information directly from data without relying on a predetermined equation as a model. The algorithms adaptively improve their performance as the number of samples available for learning increases. This session will provide a gentle introduction on machine-learning methods, terminology, and demonstrate an application for using machine-learning algorithms in primary care datasets.

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) dates back into antiquity – intelligent robots appear in the myths of many ancient societies, including Greek, Arabic, Egyptian and Chinese. Today, the field of artificial intelligence is more vibrant than ever and some believe that we're on the threshold of discoveries that could change human society irreversibly, for better or worse. Humans tend to think in straight lines, but every aspect of technological progress is actually accelerating – including AI. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls this the "Law of Accelerating Returns", and presents evidence that an amount of progress equal to the entire 20th century's gains was attained between 2000 and 2014. He also argues that the same amount will happen again before 2021. Understanding the exponential nature of progress and ignoring the inner tendency to think things will keep improving at the same rate is key to getting to grips with how fast we'll make scientific advances in the future.

If you receive post in London this month, there's a good chance it arrived to your door via an electric postal truck. Royal Mail is trialling nine British-made fully electric commercial vehicles this month, transporting packages between mail and distribution centres in the capital. The firm hopes that the trial will increase Royal Mail's efficiency, and reduce vehicle emissions. While the trucks will have human drivers, they are'autonomous-ready', which suggests that Royal Mail deliveries could one day be made by driverless vehicles. However, Royal Mail says it has'no current plans' to roll out the technology.

Self-driving cars will change how we live, in all sorts of ways. But they won't just affect us humans – the coming revolution in autonomous transport has significant implications for wildlife as well. Nature conservationists and planners need to think hard about the impact of driverless vehicles, most notably in terms of renewed urban sprawl. Driverless cars could mean more people will commute from further afield, researchers say - and could be bad news for green areas. Warn the technology could spark a huge rise in urbanisation, and city planners must be aware of the issues.

Rapid digitization and changing customer demographics are putting immense pressure on the insurers today and making them rethink the way they run the insurance industry. Millennials, who are the true digital generation, have already taken over the baby boomers and now make up a quarter of the UK population as per the Inkling Millenial Report 2015. Almost 20% of millennials say they would buy insurance from Google since they are easier to reach as per a recent IBM Institute of Business Value study (read more here). How is then the insurance industry adapting to the cultural change with the new millennial buyer and getting ready for the next big disruption in the market? From changing the business model to adapting to the constantly evolving regulatory compliance and data security, disruptive InsurTech players and changing customer expectations, the insurance industry clearly experiences a growing appetite and need to innovate and remain relevant for future generations.

The problem of low rank matrix completion is considered in this paper. To exploit the underlying low-rank structure of the data matrix, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian prior model, where columns of the low-rank matrix are assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and a common precision matrix, and a Wishart distribution is specified as a hyperprior over the precision matrix. We show that such a hierarchical Gaussian prior has the potential to encourage a low-rank solution. Based on the proposed hierarchical prior model, a variational Bayesian method is developed for matrix completion, where the generalized approximate massage passing (GAMP) technique is embedded into the variational Bayesian inference in order to circumvent cumbersome matrix inverse operations. Simulation results show that our proposed method demonstrates superiority over existing state-of-the-art matrix completion methods.

The heads of more than 100 of the world's top artificial intelligence companies are very alarmed about the development of'killer robots'. In an open letter to the UN, these business leaders – including Tesla's Elon Musk and the founders of Google's DeepMind AI firm – warned that autonomous weapon technology could be misused by terrorists and despots or hacked to perform in undesirable ways. But the real threat is much bigger – and not just from human misconduct but from the machines themselves. Research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions. The research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions.