A Data Science Interview involves different challenges for a potential data scientist. As much as the interview is for the company to decide if the person is a fit, it as also, for the person to decide if the company is a fit. Understanding a company as a fit requires one to ask some important questions to the interviewers and understand how the data team functions in different areas. Technical Debt in Data Science is one such area. My AI Interview Questions articles for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn, Ebay, Twitter, Walmart, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce and Uber have been very helpful to the readers.

Social robots have had it tough recently. There are lots of reasons for this, but a big part of it is that it's a challenge to develop a social robot that's able to spark long-term user interest without driving initial expectations impractically high. This isn't just the case for commercial robots--social robots designed for long-term user interaction studies have the same sorts of issues. The Honda Research Institute is well aware of how tricky this is, and researchers there have been working on the design of a prototype social robot that achieves a "balance between human expectation, surface appearance, physical affordance, and robot functionality." It's called Haru, and Honda Research has provided a fascinating and detailed look into how they came up with its design.

But they did not imagine one thing: that the first places where humans and humanoids interacted would be airports. Robots now do things like scan boarding passes and provide duty free shopping advice. For many people, this will be the very first chance to interact in an everyday context with robots designed to mimic human behavior. Many of us have cleaning robots at home, of course. They are able to roam around, avoiding furniture and any other obstacle -- and that's kind of like one of the robots you'll find at Seoul Incheon airport, one of the busiest in the world.

More than 2,400 AI researchers recently signed a pledge promising not to build so-called autonomous weapons--systems that would decide on their own whom to kill. This follows Google's decision not to renew a contract to supply the Pentagon with AI for analysis of drone footage after the company came under pressure from many employees opposed to its work on a project known as Maven. Paul Scharre, the author of a new book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, believes that AI researchers need to do more than opt out if they want to bring about change. An Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan and now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, Scharre argues that AI experts should engage with policymakers and military professionals to explain why researchers are concerned and help them understand the limitations of AI systems. Scharre spoke with MITTechnology Review senior editor Will Knight about the best way to halt a potentially dangerous AI arms race.

Sameer is overjoyed when his daughter gets admission to a dream university. However, he realises that he has to arrange a fairly large amount of funds quickly. Sameer browses his bank's website aided by a friendly chatbot, calls up the call centre where a virtual assistant arranges for a sales officer to visit him and help apply for a loan on a tablet, and obtain immediate approvals based on an automated credit scoring system. All of Sameer's banking interactions were assisted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is empowering banks to make customer lives simpler and easier. AI is not one single application.

Microsoft's chatbot Xiaoice does a lot more than other bots. She has presented the weather on live TV and now even composed a book of poems. Xiaoice has written 12 million of poems in fact. In a paper on arXiv, researchers from Microsoft, National Taiwan University, and the University of Montreal explained that all text Xiaoice wrote is inspired by images. "Given an image, we first extract a few keywords representing objects and sentiments perceived from the image. These keywords are then expanded to related ones based on their associations in human written poems. Finally, verses are generated gradually from the keywords using recurrent neural networks trained on existing poems," according to the paper's abstract.

A recent report stated that a survey conducted by an Information and Technology market research and advisory firm highlights that AI adoption in the ASEAN region is on the rise. Current AI adoption rates stand at 14% across Southeast Asia as compared to just 8% last year, marking a clear move by companies to embed some form of AI/cognitive intelligence into their operations. Discovery of better business insights has become the most important adoption driver according to more than half (52%) of respondents, moving from third most important in 2017, revealing a maturity in the way the region is harnessing AI to enhance their business. Other top drivers this year are enhanced process automation (51%) and improved productivity (42%). Malaysia came in fourth with 8.1% of all its organisations being open to the adoption and integration of Artificial Intelligence into their operation.

This article is a guest post on NoCamels and has been contributed by a third party. NoCamels assumes no responsibility for the content, including facts, visuals, and opinions presented by the author(s). Mor Assia is a founding partner at iAngels, an Israeli VC and angel investment firm, and iCapital, an investment platform dedicated to blockchain opportunities. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are possibly the two most influential technologies currently fueling innovation at this very moment and are expected to create radical shifts in almost every industry. Israeli startups are at the forefront of both of these sectors, receiving notable attention and investments from global players which are further propelling Israeli development in these industries.

When it comes to developing drugs, the human brain is its own worst enemy. Though our pre-frontal cortex – the most complex structure known in nature – has devised countless remedies for the body that keeps it alive, the organ itself is almost impervious to treatment. The problem is that the filter system that stops toxins passing from the bloodstream into the brain also tends to block the very medicines designed to cure what ails it – from deadly tumours to Azlheimer's, Parkinson's and depression. Pharmaceutical companies have been hammering on this door for decades. Now Noor Shaker (pictured, above) wants to make the molecular equivalent of a skeleton key.

Netflix's movies and shows couldn't compete at Cannes this year, but the streaming titan did come home with more content -- including worldwide distribution rights (except in China) for the animated film Next Gen. The company released the first trailer for the film, which is arriving on September 7th. Netflix paid $30 million for the rights, which may have been one of the biggest deals coming out of the festival; With footage, it's clear what the streaming company saw in the film. Featuring the voice talents of Charlyne Yi, John Krasinski, Michael Peña, Constance Wu, Jason Sudeikis and David Cross, Next Gen seems like Big Hero 6 crossed with I, Robot. It looks bright, earnest and full of jokes -- a crisp family-friendly film with pretty good computer-animated visuals for a non-Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks production.