Automation, digital platforms, and other innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work. Understanding these shifts can help policy makers, business leaders, and workers move forward. The world of work is in a state of flux, which is causing considerable anxiety--and with good reason. There is growing polarization of labor-market opportunities between high- and low-skill jobs, unemployment and underemployment especially among young people, stagnating incomes for a large proportion of households, and income inequality. Migration and its effects on jobs has become a sensitive political issue in many advanced economies. And from Mumbai to Manchester, public debate rages about the future of work and whether there will be enough jobs to gainfully employ everyone.

"By far, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it." Artificial intelligence (AI) is pushing the boundaries of human imagination. Machines today are capable of doing a lot of things that we could not imagine doing 20 years ago. AI has changed the way we look at learning and inventing. From drug discovery to sports analysis to protecting the oceans, AI has marked its presence everywhere.

Join us at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) for a full day workshop that will bring together international stakeholders in robotics to examine best practices for accelerating robotics innovation through strategic policy frameworks. This is a unique opportunity to learn from people who have played a significant role in designing and implementing major strategic robotics initiatives around the globe. Objectives In the past decade, a number of governing bodies and industry consortia have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. With the roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU etc. well underway, the time is right to take stock of these strategic robotics initiatives to see what is working, what is not, and what best practices in roadmap development might be broadly applied to other regions. The objective of this two-part workshop is to examine the process of how these policy frameworks came to be created in the first place, how they have been tailored to local capabilities and strengths, and what performance indicators are being used to measure their success -- so that participants may draw from international collective experience as they design and evaluate strategic robotics initiatives for their own regions.

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. We could watch these water drones swim and dive all day. They were developed by APIUM Swarm Robotics, which took them for a swim off of Catalina Island in California.

Tech Review (TR 2017-07-15)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news: Features • 1) How Google Cloud Plans to Overtake Amazon's AWS: TensorFlow, 2) FCC Net Neutrality Nomination Hearing, 3) Mars Rover 2020 and Europa Clipper, 4) Q2 2017 earnings T-Mobile $TMUS & Qualcomm $QCOM, 5) BlackHat and DefCon, 6) Rural Broadband Internet, 7) ICYMI Tech News. 1) How Google Cloud Plans to Overcome Amazon's AWS Lead in Cloud Computing: TensorFlow TensorFlow: Machine Learning for Everyone "TensorFlow [domain: tensorflow.org] is becoming the clear leader among programmers building new things with machine learning. "We have significant usage today, and it's accelerating," says Jeff Dean, who led TensorFlow's design and heads Google's core artificial- intelligence research group. Once you've built something with TensorFlow, you can run it anywhere--but it's especially easy to transfer it to Google's cloud platform." Other Tech News: 2) FCC Net Neutrality Nomination Hearing FCC - U.S. Senate Committee On Commerce, Science, & Transportation: "Ajit Varadaraj Pai, of Kansas, to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission (Reappointment) - Jessica Rosenworcel, of Connecticut, to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission (Reappointment) - Brendan Carr, of Virginia, to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission," Wednesday, July 19, 2017 10:00 a.m. See also Poll of Republican voters shows that a majority of President Trump's supporters are in favor of net neutrality rules and also oppose the pending AT&T-Time Warner merger TheHill.com.

Remember, just because you get the algorithm to run doesn't mean the result isn't nonsense. If you're new to all of this, then the Machine Learning Foundations course on Coursera is a good place to start -- despite the creepy floating half-professor.

Inspite of all the current hype, AI is not a new field of study, but it has its ground in the fifties. If we exclude the pure philosophical reasoning path that goes from the Ancient Greek to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Pascal, AI as we know it has been officially started in 1956 at Dartmouth College, where the most eminent experts gathered to brainstorm on intelligence simulation. This happened only a few years after Asimov set his own three laws of robotics, but more relevantly after the famous paper published by Turing (1950), where he proposes for the first time the idea of a thinking machine and the more popular Turing test to assess whether such machine shows, in fact, any intelligence. As soon as the research group at Dartmouth publicly released the contents and ideas arisen from that summer meeting, a flow of government funding was reserved for the study of creating a nonbiological intelligence. Atthat time, AI seemed to be easily reachable, but it turned out that was not the case.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, "Matrix"-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb?

With just two months to go before Apple is expected to reveal its next smartphone, claims the firm is experiencing problems that could result in a delay are mounting. In the latest warning, Bank of America Merrill Lynch lowered its estimates for Apple's iPhone shipments by 11 million for the year, and suggest it could be delayed by a month. 'Our conversations with the Supply Chain suggest that the iPhone 8 will ship 3-4 weeks delayed given technological issues which Apple and its suppliers are working through,' analysts Wamsi Mohan and Stefano Pascale said in a report Wednesday, citing a recent trip to Asia, according to CNBC. New claims suggest that Apple is working'feverishly' to fix software problems with its wireless charging and 3D face recognition systems. The analysts said problems with finger print and 3-D sensors were to blame for the delay.

Artificial Intelligence is set to disrupt every industry vertical. While scenarios like self-driving cars and cancer diagnosis instantly get our attention, more common areas such as IT operations and DevOps are also impacted by AI. One of the core aspects of DevOps is monitoring and logging. It is common for IT administrators and system operations managers to collect and aggregate logs in a central location. Typically, these logs are used for audit trail, and to perform root cause analysis and remediation.