Mercedes-Benz plans to introduce a production car powered by artificial intelligence in the next year as part of a collaboration with chip-maker Nvidia. Plans for the car were disclosed during a talk Friday between Sajjad Khan, Mercedes-Benz' vice president of digital vehicle and mobility, and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, at CES here. "I am very proud of saying that within 12 months we are rolling out a product with Nvidia," Khan said on Friday. Very few details of the car are known, including whether it will be a completely new vehicle or an existing Mercedes model. It is a product of a three-year collaboration, according to Huang.

At the age of 10, Ben Moore took a brave decision. He chose to have the lower part of his right leg amputated and was fitted with an artificial limb. Ben was born with a condition known as fibular hemimelia - giving him a foot with only three toes and a leg that failed to develop. It left him struggling to walk and frequently in pain. Ben was fitted with an artificial leg after his amputation - which he says was fine for walking around school, but which did not match his sporting ambitions.

Without a doubt, 2016 was the year "disruption" became tangible. Events like Brexit and the U.S. election brought home the reality we are living in a fast-changing global society where a sense of anti-establishment and rebellion is accelerating change. This shows no sign of stopping in 2017, with new and existing technologies allowing institutions to ultimately offer more unique banking experiences. From my meetings with decision-making executives at the world's leading banks, here are the top five trends dominating their technology investment discussions: In 2017, several banks will undoubtedly take their first steps toward "conversational commerce," a term coined by Chris Messina of Uber to describe the future of messaging within apps. In 2016, we already saw several leaders like Santander and Bank of America announce their plans for chatbots; however, 2017 is the year when the rebirth of this very old technology will come into its own.

Flow, a new air quality tracker, can be used anywhere. More than half of all Americans live in counties in urban areas where they're exposed to unhealthy air according to the 2016 State of the Air report published by the American Lung Association. The US is not alone. More than 80% of people living in urban areas which monitor air pollution are exposed to air quality levels exceeding the World Health Organization limits. In December 2016, Paris reported the worst pollution in a decade. The city has adopted new measures to reduce smog including making all public transportation free on days when the pollution is highest including public bikes (Velib) and electric cars (Autolib').

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. FLASH Robotics has recently previewed its new EMYS robot head. The popping-out eyes are gone in this version, which aims to be more kid friendly, but it remains one of the weirdest looking and most expressive robot heads we've ever seen: This video is part of the DARS 2016 paper, "Programmable Self-Disassembly for Shape Formation in Large-Scale Robot Collectives," by Melvin Gauci, Radhika Nagpal, and Michael Rubenstein.

We are living in a new social era of living and with that there is a need for smarter solutions and assistants that can recognise and effectively identify friends, from intruders. Like with FLARE by BuddyGuard, an indoor security camera that protects homes all by itself using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology on a small custom-made IoT hardware device. At the second annual Virtual Assistant Summit taking place on the 26 - 27 January, George Platon, CTO and Founder of BuddyGuard, will be sharing the company's approach to AI assistants in the job of home security. I asked him a few questions ahead of the summit to learn more about his role, and how AI can be utilised within home security. What do you feel are the leading factors enabling recent advancements and uptake of virtual assistants?

The London Ambulance Service is investigating whether computer failure in the early hours of New Year's Day may have contributed to the death of a patient. BBC News can reveal that at least one 999 patient died during the period that the computers were down. A major investigation is being carried out to determine the cause of the problems and the full clinical impact. The Care Quality Commission said it would inspect the trust next month. The computer-aided dispatch system, which logs emergencies and allocates ambulances, failed just after midnight.

There is no shortage of attention lately on the "Internet of Things". As a case in point, see the "Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things Act" or "DIGIT Act", i.e., S. 2607, a bill introduced in the Senate on March 1, 2016 and amended on September 28, 2016, "to ensure appropriate spectrum planning and inter-agency coordination to support the Internet of Things" – A companion bill, H.R. 5117, was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 28, 2016. However, since there is no "internet" dedicated to "things", it is fair to state that the Internet of Things does not exist as such. We are left with a definitional vacuum, but it is hammering the obvious to acknowledge that there is no dearth of attempts around the world to fill the gap. Perhaps as a helpful shortcut, we could view the expression as a metaphor that captures the arrival of almost anything and everything, until now out of scope, into the communications space.

Courtesy of Funimation, the Mamoru Oshii directed Ghost in the Shell anime movie from 1995 will be briefly coming back to movie theaters at the start of February. Launched in select U.S. theaters on February 7th and 8th, if you are at all a fan of the movie then you really need to see this on the big screen. The choice of Mamoru Oshii and his team back in the 90's to adapt Masamune Shirow's manga of Ghost in the Shell was definitely an interesting one. However, after intricate and subtle films like Patlabor 2, having the same team come up with a modern tale of cyberpunk intrigue made a good deal of sense. Due to the nature of film, much of the exposition in the manga had to be skipped, specifically that of the artificially intelligent Fuchikomas.

The days of lugging around a laptop computer are on the way out, because you may soon be able to fit a portable computer into your wallet. Intel introduced its latest mini-computer at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday. Called the Compute Card, the device is so small and thin it's the size of a credit card, just slightly thicker. Intel introduced its latest mini-computer at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday. Called the Compute Card, the device is so small and thin it's the size of a credit card, just slightly thicker The Compute Card is a computer, complete with 7th Generation Intel Kaby Lake processor, memory, Bluetooth, storage and wireless connectivity.