A driverless-vehicle startup has become the first company approved to make deliveries in in California using an autonomous vehicle. Mountain View, California-based Nuro says it plans to begin commercial service as early as next year. Nuro started testing its fleet on California roads in 2017 and, during the pandemic, has shuttled medical goods to a Sacramento field hospital. The permit, however, will allow the company to charge for its service. Founded by two former Google engineers, Nuro will first launch a fleet of autonomous Toyota Priuses, then introduce its own low-speed R2 vehicle.

Binary "YES-NO" notions of process compliance are not very helpful to managers for assessing the operational performance of their company because a large number of cases fall in the grey area of partial compliance. Hence, it is necessary to have ways to quantify partial compliance in terms of metrics and be able to classify actual cases by assigning a numeric value of compliance to them. In this paper, we formulate an evaluation framework to quantify the level of compliance of business processes across different levels of abstraction (such as task, trace and process level) and across multiple dimensions of each task(such as temporal, monetary, role-, data-, and quality-related) to provide managers more useful information about their operations and to help them improve their decision making processes. Our approach can also add social value by making social services provided by local, state and federal governments more flexible and improving the lives of citizens.

These Visionary companies have a big idea and are well on their way to achieving it, although it isn't always an easy road for any really innovative technology. In the case of Cruise, that meant testing self driving vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, one of the hardest driving environments in the world. Some of our Visionary Awards go to companies who are opening up new market applications for robotics, such as Built Robotics in construction, Dishcraft in food services, Embark in self-driving trucks, Iron Ox in urban agriculture and Zipline in drone delivery. Some are building tools or platforms that the entire robotics industry can benefit from, such as Agility Robotics, Covariant, Formant, RobustAI and Zoox. The companies in our Good Robot Awards also show that'technologies built for us, have to be built by us'.

The fourth-annual Midas List Europe, produced by Forbes in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, has arrived, and we're excited to share the top companies that drove the portfolios of this year's top European venture capitalists. The outlook for the European venture market may have been cloudy at the beginning of the global pandemic as recessionary cutbacks loomed and the IPO window narrowed, but European startups and investors have since bounced back. A wide variety of tech-based startups have been able to ride the tailwinds of the crisis, with new areas of everyday life benefitting from the transition to a technology-driven environment. Evidentially, investors remain clear-eyed and eager to invest in growth and innovation on either side of the pond with European VC deal value – and potentially fundraising – on pace to set new annual records. Here are the top ten companies that acted as key drivers behind this year's Midas List Europe: It's been a boom year for Stockholm-based Spotify, which is making its third consecutive appearance as the #1 driver on the Midas List Europe and fourth appearance overall.

While Canadian capital markets slowed this week after a very busy previous week, in the week ahead, we're looking forward to the trading debut of Sophic client, Luckbox (LUCK-TSXV). Emerge Ecommerce (ECOM-TSXV) is also expected to start trading this coming week. Meanwhile, in the USA, AirBnB, DoorDash and C3.AI, all had very strong trading debuts as expected by most. At the same time, IPOs of Roblox and Affirm seem delayed to 2021, with speculation that these companies may try a different approach than the traditional IPO in order to avoid massive IPO pops, which do not benefit companies issuing new stock. Some alternatives could include direct listing, auction IPOs or going public via a SPAC. At the same time, there seems to be increasing chatter about unsustainable valuations.

Update Friday 11 December: As per an official Hyundai press release, the South Korean company and SoftBank Group agreed today on the main terms of the transaction. Hyundai Motor "will acquire a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics in a deal that values the mobile robot firm at $1.1 billion," read the statement. The exact financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal will bring Hyundai Motor's mobility expertise into the world of robotics technologies. This move brings Hyundai Motors one step closer to its vision of transforming into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. "We are delighted to have Boston Dynamics, a world leader in mobile robots, join the Hyundai team. This transaction will unite capabilities of Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics to spearhead innovation in future mobility," stated Euisun Chung, Chairman of Hyundai Motor.

Hyundai Motors is acquiring Boston Dynamics, according to The Korea Economic Daily. The publication says Softbank has agreed to sell the robot maker for 1 trillion won (US$917 million) and that the acquisition will be finalized at a board meeting today, December 10th. The companies have been discussing a sale since at least early November, based on a previous report by Bloomberg. Boston Dynamics is known for its nightmare-inducing (or oddly adorable, depending on your perspective) robotic dog Spot, which it started selling in mid--2020 for $75,000. The four-legged robot can climb stairs, herd sheep and pull a rickshaw.

Uber has sold its loss-making flying taxi division, Elevate, to a Californian startup as it abandons costly side projects in an attempt to turn a profit next year. The sale to Joby Aviation, announced late on Tuesday, comes a day after Uber ditched ambitions to develop its own self-driving car and sold its autonomous vehicle division, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), to the startup Aurora Innovation for $4bn (£3bn). Uber and Joby described the Elevate sale as an "expanded partnership". It will result in Uber investing an additional $75m (£56m) in Joby. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, said: "Advanced air mobility has the potential to be exponentially positive for the environment and future generations. This deal allows us to deepen our partnership with Joby, the clear leader in this field, to accelerate the path to market for these technologies."

C3.ai is expected to go public on Wednesday. The company will have about 109 million fully diluted shares outstanding after the offering and two concurrent private placements: Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to buy $50 million of stock at the IPO price, while Spring Creek Capital, an affiliate of Koch Industries, has pledged to invest $100 million on the same basis. At the top of the range, the company would be worth about $4.1 billion. The company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AI. The underwriting group for the deal is led by Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities.

These days, artificial intelligence is showing up in all sorts of new services. There's a reason: The use of AI is growing fast, and businesses putting it to good use are unlocking efficiencies and delivering better experiences to their customers. According to tech researcher IDC, global spending on AI is expected to have increased more than 12% this year and to top $156 billion. That's impressive given the current state of world affairs, and AI is expected to continue its expansion for the foreseeable future. If investing in the artificial intelligence trend for the long-haul is your goal, Dynatrace (NYSE:DT), Marvell Technology Group (NASDAQ:MRVL), and Medallia (NYSE:MDLA) stocks are worth serious looks.