Ugly is a film built on beautiful contradictions. The characters have odd, blocky proportions and stumble around like a group of drunk boxers. The town, too, is comprised of weirdly angular cars, buildings, bicycles and trash bags. There's a consistency to the art style, though, that resembles origami and the papercraft video game Tearaway. And the lighting, a stunning mixture of pastel pinks and blues, gives every frame a warm, inviting sheen.

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 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. Researchers at the Human Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts are teaching their PR2 to pick up objects by giving the robot instructions using natural language. Pretty cool project, but do they have to use a...knife?

A few are studded with bright, white lights, right in the center, which is fun. And the way the hexagons, each the size of a manhole cover, have been bunched into clusters feels natural and sensible. Surely a Fibonacci sequence is hiding somewhere in there. What's important about these shapes is what they represent to Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, Waymo, and Loon. It's how the company envisions the street of the future: as a series of removable, modular, flexible pavers.

Mathieu d'Aquin is a Professor of Informatics specialised in data analytics and semantic technologies at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics of the National University of Ireland Galway. He was previously Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, where he led the Data Science Group. In this interview, he speaks about research on semantic web technologies and specific application of web data technologies, which are two key areas of his work interest. You have been working for years on Semantic Web/Linked Data technologies. What will shape our future the most?

I just got hold of some embarrassing video footage of Texas senator Ted Cruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. His political enemies will have great fun showing it during the midterms. Donald Trump will call him "Dancin' Ted." Okay, I'll admit it--I created the video myself. But here's the troubling thing: making it required very little video-editing skill. I downloaded and configured software that uses machine learning to perform a convincing digital face-swap.

Earlier this week BusinessCloud published its 51 AI Innovators list, detailing some of the UK's most disruptive and innovative companies. The list was published in alphabetical order so we invited the public to vote for the one they thought should be top – and we were swamped with votes from all round the world. To make it fair it was only one vote per person and/or email address. Based on votes received it quickly became a three-horse race between London-based DigitalGenius, Oldham's EnergiMine and Liverpool firm LivingLens. By the time the voting closed at midday on Thursday the clear winner was DigitalGenius, which uses AI to automatically organise and reply to incoming customers messages.

Elon Musk repeatedly broke down in an interview in which he attempted to explain some of his recent strange behaviour. The Tesla boss has admitted to taking pills to sleep and that he has had a difficult year, alternating between laughter and crying as he did. And he revealed that the stress of the year appears to be undermining his physical health. "It's not been great, actually. I've had friends come by who are really concerned," he said. 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.

Spark lets you apply machine learning techniques to data in real time, giving users immediate machine-learning based insights based on what's happening right now. Using Spark, we can create machine learning models and programs that are distributed and much faster compared to standard machine learning toolkits such as R or Python. In this course, you'll learn how to use the Spark MLlib. You'll find out about the supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms. You'll build classifications models, extracting proper futures from text using Word2Vect to achieve this.

Now it has been changing faster than ever. Only 20 years ago the world got introduced to mobile phones. Within just ten years the world got addicted to it. You cannot even imagine a world with the internet and smart devices these days. Maybe lately, you have been buzzed with this term Web 3.0 blockchain stack. Today we will tell you everything on Web 3.0 blockchain stack and why it matters! The world took a big leap when the e-mails got replaced with chats and emoji. But that was also ten years back. The world is hungry for new things. While everything around you started changing, the very internet grew up. It started with raw skeletons of websites made with basic HTML. Sooner websites got smarter and became interactive. Only time can tell how smart the internet will be in the era of Web3 blockchain stack. Make yourself a hot cup of coffee. It's going to be a long and detailed to read. Web 3.0 IT stack is still not developed yet completely. But it's about to come out with full-on actions. So, what is Web 3? While Web 1.0 and 2.0 had centralized servers and, Web 3.0 blockchain stack has a decentralized network which more user-centric. A transparent and secured internet that focuses on making things more humane. There are five major significant features of Web 3.0 blockchain stack. We think these will help you to grasp the whole concept better. We are using a term these days a lot to define a device that can connect and use internet – smart. We are now surrounded by these smart devices. Are you wondering – how so? Well, take a moment and look around you. There are smart fridges, people are using home assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, your smartphones, and tabs. All of these things can connect to the internet.

Mr. Pichai, speaking Thursday at a weekly all-hands meeting in Mountain View, Calif., was responding to criticism from employees, human rights groups and others who in recent days have voiced concerns over the Alphabet Inc. unit's work with the Chinese government. Google is developing services for Chinese citizens, including a search engine that could adhere to China's strict censors, The Wall Street Journal and others reported last week. At the meeting, Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin sounded optimistic about doing more business in China, cautioning that progress in the country is "slow-going and complicated." Mr. Brin was instrumental in Google's decision in 2010 to withdraw its search engine from China to protest the government's censorship regime and attempts to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. At the time, he described the government as having the "earmarks of totalitarianism" of the Soviet Union, where he was born.