Officials have claimed in the wake of the global ransomware attack that patient care has been unaffected despite 45 NHS sites being hit. But hospitals across England and Scotland were forced to cancel routine procedures and divert emergency cases in the wake of the attack, which has shut down access to computers in almost 100 countries. I have been unable to look after patients properly. However much they pretend patient safety is unaffected – it's not true. At my hospital we are literally unable to do any X-rays, which are an essential component of emergency medicine.

Germany, home to one of the world's largest automotive industries, passed a law Friday, which would allow autonomous cars to be tested on the country's public roads, Reuters reported Friday. The move could provide the country an advantage over the U.S., as it is still quibbling over self-driving legislation here. The German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt called self-driving, "the greatest mobility revolution since the invention of the car." According to the report, the new law would allow human drivers assigned to self-driven vehicles to remove their hands from the steering, giving vehicle makers a chance to get an accurate assessment of the functioning of self-driven vehicles. However, the law still requires human drivers to stay in the driving seat, in case they need to take control at any time during the self-driving trials.

German automakers won't have to bring their experimental autonomous cars to California for testing anymore. The country has just approved a law allowing companies to test their self-driving cars on its roads, so long as they follow a set of conditions. Perhaps the most important requirement is that drivers must be sitting behind the wheel all the time. They can take their eyes off the road to, say, use their phone and browse the internet, but they need to be able to take over if the vehicle's AI needs them to. In addition, the vehicles need to have a black box to record the journey and log whether it's the AI or the driver that's in charge. The box's logs will determine who's to blame in case of accidents: if it's a human in charge, then the government will hold the driver responsible.

Customer churn can provide great insights into what needs to change in business. In 2016, over a million customers switched their banks in the UK. With Current Account Switch Service in effect in UK, the pace of switching is making Current Accounts look a lot like Gas & Heating suppliers. By digging deeper into consumers' reasons for changing banks, the primary determinant is poor customer service; closely followed by accessibility by 23 per cent of respondents, rewards (16%) and special offers (13%). Collectively this is leading to a more competitive environment that favours the consumer.

The Madrid ASDM summer school is in its twelfth edition this year, with hundreds of students from all over the world having attended so far. It comprises 12 intensive (15 lecture hours) week-long courses, and a student may attend from one up to six courses. The courses cover topics such as Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Bayesian Networks, Big Data with Apache Spark, Bayesian Inference, Text Mining and Time Series, and each has theoretical as well as practical classes, done with R or python. While the summer school is mainly attended by people from academia - PhD students and researchers, people from the industry also assist. The students come from diverse backgrounds, ranging from biology to economics to mathematics and physics.

Plants monitor their surrounding environment and control their physiological functions by producing an electrical response. We recorded electrical signals from different plants by exposing them to Sodium Chloride (NaCl), Ozone (O3) and Sulfuric Acid (H2SO4) under laboratory conditions. After applying pre-processing techniques such as filtering and drift removal, we extracted few statistical features from the acquired plant electrical signals. Using these features, combined with different classification algorithms, we used a decision tree based multi-class classification strategy to identify the three different external chemical stimuli. We here present our exploration to obtain the optimum set of ranked feature and classifier combination that can separate a particular chemical stimulus from the incoming stream of plant electrical signals. The paper also reports an exhaustive comparison of similar feature based classification using the filtered and the raw plant signals, containing the high frequency stochastic part and also the low frequency trends present in it, as two different cases for feature extraction. The work, presented in this paper opens up new possibilities for using plant electrical signals to monitor and detect other environmental stimuli apart from NaCl, O3 and H2SO4 in future.

The link between different psychophysiological measures during emotion episodes is not well understood. To analyse the functional relationship between electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG), we apply historical function-on-function regression models to EEG and EMG data that were simultaneously recorded from 24 participants while they were playing a computerised gambling task. Given the complexity of the data structure for this application, we extend simple functional historical models to models including random historical effects, factor-specific historical effects, and factor-specific random historical effects. Estimation is conducted by a component-wise gradient boosting algorithm, which scales well to large data sets and complex models.

In supervised learning, an inductive learning algorithm extracts general rules from observed training instances, then the rules are applied to test instances. We show that this splitting of training and application arises naturally, in the classical setting, from a simple independence requirement with a physical interpretation of being non-signalling. Thus, two seemingly different definitions of inductive learning happen to coincide. This follows from the properties of classical information that break down in the quantum setup. We prove a quantum de Finetti theorem for quantum channels, which shows that in the quantum case, the equivalence holds in the asymptotic setting, that is, for large number of test instances. This reveals a natural analogy between classical learning protocols and their quantum counterparts, justifying a similar treatment, and allowing to inquire about standard elements in computational learning theory, such as structural risk minimization and sample complexity.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. A very clever design for a small mobile robot by Draganfly Innovations: morphing wheels allow it to climb stairs with ease. The DraganScout by Draganfly Innovations Inc. is a unique ground-based robot with the ability to morph and adapt to different application or mission needs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) go together like philosophy goes with Greece. It was AI, the IoT and a shared philosophy of openness that brought Software AG and Zementis together; first into a productive partnership and then into a merger of the two companies. Michael Zeller, co-founder of Zementis and now senior vice president of AI Strategy & Innovation at Software AG, said: "What we had in common was an open platform philosophy; that openness led us both to customer success during our partnership." The synergies were obvious, said Zeller. "As part of Software AG, we could do so much more; with Apama for streaming analytics and us for ML we can go way beyond what each could do separately." AI, along with machine learning (ML), offers organizations the ability to turn data into business value.