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. Frankly, I'm not sure why this is only now a thing: Be right back: need to resurrect my lost childhood. This video documents our field experiments at White Sands National Monument [in New Mexico] with the RHex robot, in March 2016. It demonstrates the great potential for RHex to assist aeolian scientists in desert research.

Internet experts and highly engaged netizens participated in answering an eight-question survey fielded by Elon University and the Pew Internet Project from late November 2013 through early January 2014. Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from that. Among the key themes emerging from 1,896 respondents' answers were: - Advances in technology may displace certain types of work, but historically they have been a net creator of jobs. This page holds the content of the survey report, which is an organized look at respondents elaborations derived from 250 single-spaced pages of responses from ...

Travers Smith has joined the growing number of law firms looking at artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve their working processes. The firm has begun trialling the use of due diligence technology developed by software company RAVN Systems in its corporate department. RAVN offers a wide variety of services with its AI engine, including e-discovery, data search tools and contract governance process automation. A number of other law firms have signed up to work with the company recently. In May, Linklaters became the first magic circle firm to sign up to an AI provider when it agreed a deal to use RAVN as its provider for a number of automated tasks.

A global study of 750 grocery decision-makers reveals key challenges in meeting customer expectations. Grocery retailers face many challenges and barriers to delivering on their customer experience promises of'any time, anywhere'. To understand these challenges, we commissioned a global survey to discover how grocery retail managers and directors feel about their customer experience delivery. The research also uncovered thoughts on how to overcome the hurdles of delivering the best customer experience. The findings are the result of interviews with 750 grocery managers and directors across the globe, in the UK, USA, Germany and France.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Today on In Case You Missed It: A French company just introduced a hydrogen fuel cell train that it plans to install on a line in Germany in 2017. The train can carry 300 passengers reaching speeds of 87 miles an hour, all while emitting water rather than the usual diesel fumes that go along with such routes. We think the Casper insomnia chatbot is probably just a PR stunt by the company, but it may also be functional so you're guess is as good as ours as to why a mattress company would want to talk about people (likely their own customers) who struggle with going to sleep at night. If you're interested, the truck clock video is here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

General artificial intelligence, a machine that is capable of human-level expertise in multiple tasks, was the hot topic during the morning of the Rework Deep Learning Summit in London yesterday, with two of the UK's best AI companies Google DeepMind and Swifkey weighing in on the advances being made, and how far we are from a truly human AI. In his seminal piece about DeepMind for Wired magazine in June 2015, David Rowan wrote: "[DeepMind] showed that their artificial agent had learned to play 49 Atari 2600 video games when given only minimal background information. The deep Q-network had mastered everything from a martial-arts game to boxing and 3D car-racing games, often outscoring a professional (human) games tester." What this obfuscated was that the deep neural network was learning how to master each game one at a time. The same neural network couldn't, for example, flick between two different games and maintain its skill like a human would.

These changes are called "Industry 4.0" or the fourth industrial revolution. It is an industrial revolution that uses artificial intelligence and robots in such a way that manufacturing plants will become unmanned and a majority of office jobs will be made unnecessary. In March, an AI player of the board game go, developed by Google and named AlphaGo, defeated the world's leading professional go player 4 games to 1. The pro lost the first three games, and although he won the fourth, he was defeated in the fifth round. The decisive factor that led to the victory for AlphaGo was its "deep learning" capability.

An ancient book that has baffled experts for decades may be an elaborate hoax, it has been revealed. The centuries-old Voynich manuscript, which dates back to the middle ages, was long thought to contain a secret code and cyptographers have spent years trying to decipher the mysterious text. However, one expert now claims that simple techniques could have been used to fool people into thinking that the bizarre text was actually written in code. Many experts argue that the text contains similar features to natural languages, suggesting that it may be a code. However, Gordon Rugg, a computing expert at Keele University claims to have worked out a simple system that produces similar results in a new study.

On the surface it looks like a simple public cloud infrastructure deal. But stand back from productivity app Evernote's recently announced migration of its entire infrastructure onto Google's Cloud Platform and there's a much bigger story to tell. Productivity apps are many, but Evernote's 200 million plus customers make it one of the most popular. Allowing users to store private notes on the cloud, add multimedia, and access everything from multiple devices (recently restricted to two unless you pay a fee), Evernote's back-end now contains about five billion notes. Until now, all of that was held on Evernote's own private cloud infrastructure, but from early October it's all going to be migrated to Google's Cloud Platform. Evernote's notes were already easy to integrate with Google Drive, but this goes much deeper than the mass adoption of the cloud as a place to store data.