Ford Europe has installed a pair of'collaborative robots' on its production line in Cologne, Germany, ostensibly to help fit shock absorbers to Fiestas. But in a video that the company just released, you can see their real purpose - making coffee for the workers. The robots, which were developed in collaboration with German robotics firm KUKA Roboter, are about a metre tall and equipped with sensors that stop them if they detect obstacles in their path. That's important, as last year a worker was killed at a Volkswagen production plant by a malfunctioning industrial robot. Ford says that its new bot is capable of pinpoint accuracy, strength and dexterity, which probably comes in handy when brewing coffee and giving high fives.

The recent reports of robots taking over jobs are alarming for many employees and job-seekers. What will happen to the teeming graduates coming out of our colleges? According to HfS Research, 640,000 IT workers in India engaged in low-level tasks won't be replaced by machines. But 10 categories of professionals including cashiers, drivers, factory workers and journalists will be wiped out. Teachers will become bots, BPO workers will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence software, cars will be driverless. Would you need a human police force in the future?

In this talk, I will introduce the audience to the emerging area of computational social science, focusing on how machine learning for social science differs from machine learning in other contexts. I will present two related models -- both based on Bayesian Poisson tensor decomposition -- for uncovering latent structure from count data. The first is for uncovering topics in previously classified government documents, while the second is for uncovering multilateral relations from country-to-country interaction data. Finally, I will talk briefly about the broader ethical implications of analyzing social data. Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

That's what Microsoft's Project Malmo, formerly known as DNA Storage Project, is doing right now. Publicly unveiled today on the official Mojang blog, Project Malmo has just made its open source tools available to everyone today in an effort to help others help strengthen AI in various ways. Mojang notes that Minecraft is the perfect way to educate AI when it comes to offering solutions to problems, sharpening spatial and temporal reasoning, and even collaboration. Project Malmo can offer diverse opportunities at teaching artificial intelligence software and act as a research tool that can test these theories as well. If you're interested in seeing what Project Malmo has to offer in addition to testing it out for yourself, you can download the mod for the PC/Mac edition of Minecraft here.

Google's recent victory against top-ranked Go player Lee Sedol marks another milestone in artificial intelligence development, and though this might be considered "old" news by today's standard, it's still a fresh achievement for the AI world. As much as this gameboard conflict between man and machine has encouraged conversation about competition, it has also sparked increasing conversation around the potential collaborative possibilities. "I think the main reaction from the Go community will be, as indeed happened after IBM computer Deep Blue achieved grandmaster status in chess, is that people want to get hold of the software and use it in their own games to work out where they went wrong." This kind of industry-specific technology has the potential to be used to further thinking, strategy, and goals within the game; however, Google's Go algorithm still can't manage a daycare or compose a nostalgic sonnet--and there are still many tasks best done by human beings. By utilizing and combining the individual strengths of both humans and AI, the collaborative possibilities are limitless, and are quickly becoming applicable in much more than board games.

Google plans to use more than one million anonymized eye scans to teach computers how to diagnose ocular disease. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has signed a deal with a British eye hospital to use artificial intelligence to learn from the medical records of 1.6 million patients in London hospitals. The goal is to teach a computer program to recognize the signs of two common types of eye disease, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. That's something humans are surprisingly imperfect at. Physicians diagnose these ailments by analyzing medical charts and interviewing patients, yet still get it wrong 10 to 20% of the time.

The artificial intelligence software is learning how to recognize early signs of two eye diseases.Video provided by Newsy Newslook A scan of a human eye. SAN FRANCISCO -- Google plans to use more than one million anonymized eye scans to teach computers how to diagnose ocular disease. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has signed a deal with a British eye hospital to use artificial intelligence to learn from the medical records of 1.6 million patients in London hospitals. The goal is to teach a computer program to recognize the signs of two common types of eye disease, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. That's something humans are surprisingly imperfect at.

In a moment of fright, it's often said that you'll'jump right out of your skin' – but for one ancient insect, that's just what happened. Researchers have discovered a 50-million-year-old deposit of Baltic amber containing the exoskeleton of an ancient insect, which appears to have rapidly shed its skin in order to escape the flowing sap. The specimen also contains the first mushroom ever found in Baltic amber, along with the hair of a mammal thought to have bitten it from the base of a tree. Researchers have discovered a 50-million-year-old deposit of Baltic amber containing the exoskeleton of an ancient insect, which appears to have rapidly shed its skin in order to escape the flowing sap. Amber has been used in jewellery for thousands of years.