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. As part of DARPA's ALIAS program, this robot arm was able to help land a Boeing 737 in a simulator: The only reason this works at all is because of how heavily automated the aircraft already is. It makes me wonder what the point of the robot arm is at all: Why not just build this stuff into the existing autopilot already, you know?

Google is set to let users pay off their debts without lifting a finger. The tech giant has announced a new feature that will allow users to transfer funds to friends or family via Google Assistant. Those living in the US will just say'Ok Google, send $10 to Jane for pizza', and the AI will pull money from a linked debit card and forward it to the recipient. Google announced a new feature that will allow users to transfer funds to friends or family via Google Assistant. Those living in the US will just say'Ok Google, send $25 to Manuel Martinez', and the AI will pull money from a linked debit card and forward it to the recipient Google is rolling out a feature that lets users add a credit or debit card to their Google Account, enabling them to easily purchase goods online without.

BENGALURU: On July 2015, a journalist named Sarah O' Connor tweeted about a robot killing a worker at a car plant in Germany. Immediately, the internet went into a frenzy. Many pointed out how this incident matched the plot of the dystopian sci-fi movie, Terminator where an artificial intelligence (AI) program ultimately takes over humans. The protagonist in the movie also incidentally had the same name as the journalist. While most of the chatter was of a humorous nature by movie buffs, there were those who seemed alarmed at what they believed was the fulfilment of a prophecy of sorts.

Nothing makes us feel more like we're on Star Trek then saying "Computer, turn on desk light," and watching the light turn on. Of course, normal people would have left the wake up word as "Alexa," but we like "Computer" even if it does make it hard to watch Star Trek episodes without the home automation going crazy. There's a lot of hype right now about how voice recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming everything. We've even seen a few high-profile types warning that AI is going to come alive and put us in the matrix or something. That gets a lot of press, but we're not sure we are even close to that, yet.

This is the 2-part blog version of a talk I've given at DOAG Conference this week. I've also uploaded the slides (no ppt; just pretty R presentation;-)) to the articles section, but if you'd like a little text I'm encouraging you to read on. That is, if you're in the target group for this post/talk. For this post, let me assume you're a SQL girl (or guy). With SQL you're comfortable (an expert, probably), you know how to get and manipulate your data, no nesting of subselects has you scared;-).

Google this week held its developer conference for 2017, where it teased some of the brand new features coming to its products and services. What we saw on stage was undeniably impressive, but one of the demonstrations in particular was frighteningly so. Google Lens will give the company greater insight into our daily lives than ever before. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Machines are eating humans' jobs talents. And it's not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents. Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms. People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, ...

Amid a handful of announcements at the I/O developers' conference Wednesday, Google introduced a feature that allows you to Shazam the world. Point it at a concert poster, and your screen will pull up tickets. Point it at a flower, and it will school you on the species. The feature was a crowd favorite. At no other point in the company's two-hour keynote did the audience cheer so loudly than when engineering VP Scott Huffman aimed the camera at a router's network information and automatically logged onto the Wi-Fi.

Robots and automation are already commonplace in food warehouses, but they could soon be coming to supermarket aisles. Fujitsu's Matey, shown at the company's annual showcase in Tokyo, move autonomously through shops to monitor produce and help retailers stack shelves more effectively. The robot is about five-feet tall and moves on wheels with a screen on the front used to communicate with any humans it comes across. A Fujitsu spokesperson explained that initially it will only be used when a shop is closed, trundling up and down aisles to check stock levels. Using a cloud-based AI, the robot could also analyse the placement of products to work out if they could be arranged more effectively.

Leading funders and researchers this week agreed that all their clinical trials for vaccines and devices would in future be publicly registered and the results published. The pledge -- made by nearly a dozen groups including the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council -- is a boost for innovation and safety. Some estimates suggest that half of all trial findings, notably those that do not yield positive results, are not made public. This is a significant waste of research, burying information that could help to better direct future work, reduce dangers to patients and boost efficiency. In an era of big data and partnership between medical research and IT, there is considerable potential to improve number crunching and identify patterns in trial data.