Think government surveillance is excessive? Wait until you hear what your employer might be up to. Companies are increasingly using technology to monitor employees in the workplace, with artificial intelligence making it possible to track individuals' behaviour in great detail. Start to slack off, or show signs of going rogue, and an algorithm could tattle to your boss. One company offering such services is London-based start-up StatusToday.

In the hopes of relieving building pressures in hospitals and care homes, researchers are developing'culturally aware' robots. The emotional machines could help care for the elderly, assisting them in taking their medications and offering them companionship. Researchers have been awarded £2 million ($2.5 million) in funding to develop the bots over the next three years. In the hopes of relieving building pressures in hospitals and care homes, researchers are developing'culturally aware' robots. Pepper went on sale to consumers in Japan in June 2015 and then enterprise customers, who pay for the bot on a three-year rental basis worth around $16,000 (£12,188.80),

We have seen a fast growing interest in current activities around AI startups and research in the last couple of months. Headlines like "2016 was the year AI came of age", "AI was everywhere in 2016", and "The Great A.I. Awakening" were all over the media in the ending weeks of 2016 and we are curious about what 2017 will bring. I found particularly interesting that the current applications, future potential, and possible risks even attracted interest beyond the tech community through TV shows like Westworld, coverage on traditional media and even Obama's farewell address. Sadly, for many of us tech enthusiasts here in Europe, we sometimes feel like there is way less movement on this side of the Atlantic than in the Silicon Valley. However, with major acquisitions like DeepMind, Magic Pony Technology, Movidius, Vision Factory, and Dark Blue Labs, Europe has shown that it is actually leading the way in AI and machine learning.

Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies. So many works of film and fiction are hooked on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it might mean for humanity. They are often apocalyptic tales – Blade Runner, Alien, Terminator – where mankind comes off badly. But now that AI is being spearheaded by internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems – chat bots, purchase prediction, news generation – what will really happen? In 2015 the UK media widely picked up on American media organisation NPR's calculator that could predict which jobs are susceptible to computerisation.

Two robotic arms face two closed doors. Both reach forward and miss the door handles entirely. So they reach again, and this time, they hit the handles head-on, rattling the door frames. Finally, they grab the handles cleanly and pull the doors open, and after a few more hours of trial and error, they can repeat the trick every time. The two robots are somewhere inside Google, and though other machines have long been agile enough to pull a door handle, these are different: They learned to open those doors largely on their own.

Artificial intelligence is luring science into dangerous waters. To make scientific publishing more efficient, commercial publishers now rely more and more on editorial software systems. These are beginning to transform peer review from interaction between humans into interaction between humans and AI. We should think twice before allowing autonomous AI systems to decide what research warrants publication. Janne I. Hukkinen (@JIHukkinen) is professor of environmental policy at University of Helsinki, Finland, and editor of Ecological Economics.

Boss Sundar Pichai asked employees to fly back to the US ASAP. The President's executive order that bans almost all citizens from Iran, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen from entering the country is making tech execs move fast. Google's Sundar Pichai told overseas employees to fly back to the US as soon as possible, or risk not being able to get back at all. The immigration order also saw companies like Apple and Microsoft rush to help employees stranded following the restrictions. Surgeons were able to perform a difficult eye procedure with some robotic help.

Few frameworks have gained so much popularity as quickly as Apache Spark. The open source technology may not be ubiquitous yet in the analytics world, but it's fast approaching that point. Spark has certainly caught on among Web giants in the Silicon Valley, where it's often paired with Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra and other open source tools to process big and fast-moving data. But the real mark for Spark may be how quickly it's been adopted by real-world companies. Among the firms using the in-memory technology are credit card company Capital One, the drug giant Roche, and DNV GL, an energy consulting firm.

WhatsApp appears to be working on a new feature that would allow users to track their contacts in real time. Live Location Tracking, as it's currently known, has been spotted in the beta version of the messaging app, both on Android (version 2.16.399) and iOS (version 2.17.3.28). With the feature, users will be able to make their current location visible to members of a group chat, allowing them to find each other more easily during meet-ups. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

In 1960s and 70s Britain, immigrant ethnic minority children were dispersed across schools in the hope that it would help them integrate. The process saw children - largely of south Asian and African or Caribbean descent - being "bussed" out of their local areas to go to school. Eleven Local Area Authorities (LEAs) decided there should be no more than 30% of immigrants at any one school. It meant once that quota was reached, children were taken elsewhere. The process, which became known as "bussing", is now at the heart of a project in Bradford where Shabina Aslam is trying to trace children who, like herself, were sent to school away from where they lived.