Artificial intelligence enables virtual agents to learn by observation. That adaptive ability is what a Swedish bank is counting on to serve its customers. In early 2016, SEB, one of Sweden's largest banks with a presence in 20 countries around the globe, started integrating Amelia, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform from IPsoft, into its help desk. Amelia is represented by a blond female avatar and is always referred to as "she" rather than "it." The artificial intelligence platform is built on semantic understanding, which enables Amelia to interact with users through natural language to determine what actions to take in order to answer a question, fulfill a request or solve a problem.

So Philip Hammond unveiled his big hairy budget. The Chancellor had touted this as an "upbeat budget". A phrase that makes as much sense as "diet fish supper" or "talented Honey G". The snoozefest included £500million to be spent on robots and artificial intelligence. At which point Hammond's eyes flashed red and he started shouting "malfunction, malfunction" until somebody turned him off at the back.

Established as a partnership between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Center for Autonomous Marine Operations (NTNU AMOS) and the Norwegian government, the site includes part of Trondheim Harbor and has already been used to test everything from navigation and collision avoidance systems to operational safety and risk management projects. The technologies developed in Trondheim are expected to revolutionize the shipping industry as human crews are no longer needed to literally man the ship. "As far as we know, there are no such test sites of this kind in the world so the Norwegian Coastal Authorities are taking the lead in a changing maritime world," Kongsberg Seatex President Gard Ueland said when the site opened. "We will also see technology that has the potential to enable fully autonomous cargo vessels. Much of this will come from Trondheim, thanks to the unmatched maritime expertise here and our autonomous vehicles test bed."

After decades as laboratory curiosities, some of quantum physics' oddest effects are beginning to be put to use, says Jason Palmer PATRICK GILL, a director of the new Quantum Metrology Institute at Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in south-west London and an expert in atomic clocks, points to a large table full of lenses and mirrors, vacuum chambers and electronics. "And there's a smaller one over there," he says. NPL is part of a consortium of the planet's official timekeepers. In all its atomic-clock laboratories, each of the flagship devices--some of which are huge--is flanked by a smaller one under construction. Miniaturisation is the name of the game.

"Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side, this is his working surface, controlled by a computer with which he can communicate by means of small keyboards and various other devices." This vision of the future architect was imagined by engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart during his research into emerging computer systems at Stanford in 1962. At the dawn of personal computing he imagined the creative mind overlapping symbiotically with the intelligent machine to co-create designs. This dual mode of production, he envisaged, would hold the potential to generate new realities which could not be realized by either entity operating alone.

We are seeing today novel expressions of artificial intelligence (AI) which were just a while ago the stuff of sci-fi: autonomous vehicles, self-learning machines, fiction-writing programs which may win literary prizes. Yet, what if the AI goes awry? What if an autonomous vehicle malfunctions and damages your property? What if an AI robot hacks into a smart city's network and steals every citizen's personal data? Will our current legal liability rules give us satisfactory outcomes when applied to such scenarios?

A'global startup' which makes electric racing vehicles unveiled plans Friday to sell a fully autonomous electric car in the US market by 2020. The company called Nio, founded by Chinese entrepreneur William Li and with offices in Silicon Valley, Europe and China, unveiled a prototype of the vehicle called Eve at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas. According to a Nio statement, the car will be'a digital companion, a robot on wheels' equipped with'an artificial intelligence engine with an intuitive human interface, providing verbal and visual connections both within the vehicle and with the outside world.' The new design is more like a living room on wheels than a car. The forward two seats have an'enhanced panoramic view', with digital displays provided on the active glass when needed to support non-autonomous driving EVE has no door pillars, and interior is accessed through a wide forward-sliding door.

Sparse superposition codes were recently introduced by Barron and Joseph for reliable communication over the AWGN channel at rates approaching the channel capacity. The codebook is defined in terms of a Gaussian design matrix, and codewords are sparse linear combinations of columns of the matrix. In this paper, we propose an approximate message passing decoder for sparse superposition codes, whose decoding complexity scales linearly with the size of the design matrix. The performance of the decoder is rigorously analyzed and it is shown to asymptotically achieve the AWGN capacity with an appropriate power allocation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the decoder at finite blocklengths. We introduce a power allocation scheme to improve the empirical performance, and demonstrate how the decoding complexity can be significantly reduced by using Hadamard design matrices.

The University of Manchester is leading a consortium to investigate advanced technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence, for the operation and maintenance of offshore windfarms. The remote inspection and asset management of offshore wind farms and their connection to the shore is an industry which will be worth up to £2 billion annually by 2025 in the UK alone. Eighty to ninety percent of the cost of offshore operation and maintenance according to the Crown Estate is generated by the need to get site access - in essence get engineers and technicians to remote sites to evaluate a problem and decide what action to undertake. Such inspection takes place in a remote and hazardous environment and requires highly trained personnel of which there is likely to be a shortage in coming years. The £5m project will investigate the use of advanced sensing, robotics, virtual reality models and artificial intelligence to reduce maintenance cost and effort.

The world of data and analytics has been transformed over the last few years, providing a broad range of technologies to hold and analyse data. It has been a challenge to keep up-to-date with new concepts from NoSQL, to machine learning, to Internet of things and blockchain. The Little Bee series of books were created by IBM to provide an easy introduction to these concepts and many more in any easy and fun format. They will not make you into an expert, but they will highlight the key concepts, advantages and application areas. The books are available online and, if you are based in the UK, you can order physical copies to enjoy.