It's an event that plays out thousands of times across the UK every day. A consumer tries to pay for their weekly grocery shop using a credit card but with the bags packed at the till is unexpectedly told that it has been'declined'. The card is well within its credit limit, the PIN number is correct, the consumer has made numerous other purchases in the preceding weeks and yet there is no way around the reality of having no plastic money to spend. For the financial services industry these'false positives' have become a growing issue. As well as annoying customers and merchants they cost the industry in terms of the manual intervention necessary to authenticate customers and unblock cards.

It is exactly the latter question that usually causes the whole grand edifice of digital immortality and consciousness upload to fail. The big idea that what we perceive is not real and that all is pure mind was articulated by Plato in the 5th century BC. He described humanity living in chains inside a cave, and able to seeing only shadows on the walls of the cave that we mistake for reality. Plato suggested that only by "awakening" could someone discover the truth, and break free of the illusionary cave. Plato's ideas have informed much of Christian theology.

At your day job as a professional code Googler – I mean developer – you probably search for quick snippets multiple times a day to find the best way to perform a particular task. Almost always as developers we end up on Stack Overflow or Mozilla Developer Network, but now Microsoft's Bing has given us something even better: executable code directly in search results. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. Thanks to a collaboration with HackerRank, if you search for something like string concat C#, you'll get an interactive code editor with a result that can be run directly from that page to see how it works. It's a seriously fantastic feature that I hope Google adds soon – I'm not sure I'd switch search engine for this, but I'm incredibly jealous.

WIRED Health 2016 takes place on 29 April in London. IBM's Watson supercomputer is perhaps best known for winning the gameshow Jeopardy, but its expertise is now being applied to healthcare Kyu Rhee will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector. You might know IBM's Watson best for its victory on US game show Jeopardy!, or perhaps for its cookery prowess, or even the campaign to elect it to the US presidency. But IBM hopes that its supercomputer can also change the way doctors diagnose their patients, putting vast quantities of data at a physician's fingertips.

If you've seen the movie Her, or perhaps Iron Man, you'll know what the future of tech looks like. AI is coming and it's coming in a big way. It's here to make our lives easier and simpler, or at least, that's what all the big tech giants would have us believe. AI is nothing new, IBM has been experimenting with Watson for a couple of years. But powerful, enormous tech such as Watson is far removed from the lives of everyday people like you or me.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your fluid-filled Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few 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. MIT has developed a 3D printer that can mix solids and liquids. With "printable hydraulics," an inkjet printer deposits individual droplets of material that are each 20 to 30 microns in diameter, or less than half the width of a human hair.

A senior Egyptian al-Qaida figure fighting in Syria was killed in a U.S. drone strike this week, the latest to be killed in such attacks in Syria, a Syrian opposition monitoring group and relatives said Friday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Rifai Ahmad Taha was killed in a strike Tuesday in the northwestern Idlib province. Before joining al-Qaida, Taha was a top figure in Egypt's notorious militant group Gamaa Islamiya, which massacred 58 foreign tourists in the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997. He was also allied with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said several al-Qaida members, including Taha, were killed in Tuesday's strike.

Synopsis: There is more to Text Mining than TDM and TF-IDF. Come explore the world of Sentiment Analysis using Advanced Text Mining techniques with cutting edge tools like Stanford's CoreNLP and analysing it's output using Python. Speaker: Aditya Shankar is a Lecturer in the Intelligent Systems practice at the Institute of Systems Science in the National University of Singapore. He started his career consulting for Microsoft in Redmond, WA, Nike in Portland, OR and T-Mobile in Seattle, WA. He then moved on to work for companies in the Healthcare domain, mostly healthcare providers in Tennessee.

In the late '90s, Tomi Poutanen, a precocious computer whiz from Finland, hoped to do his dissertation on neural networks, a scientific method aimed at teaching computers to act and think like humans. As a student at the University of Toronto, it was a logical choice. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of neural network research, taught and ran a research lab there. But instead of encouraging Poutanen, who went on to work at Yahoo and recently co-founded media startup Milq, one of his professors sent a stern warning about taking the academic path known as deep learning. "Smart scientists," his professor cautioned, "go there to see their careers end."

The U.S. unveiled the prototype of an autonomous, experimental warship Thursday that would drastically reduce the cost of operations at sea and mark progress in the move toward robotic warfare. It comes as the military has increasingly aimed to boost unmanned technology to counter Chinese and Russian investments. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work told Reuters in an interview. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship." Work said he hoped unmanned ships would be stationed in the western Pacific within as few as five years.