A robot named "Little Casper" has been designed to help children in hospital suffering from cancer. It is currently being tested at this hospital in Lisbon. Little Casper is just not an ordinary robot. He was built to perceive the environment and to interact with it. Casper plays and talks; sophisticated sensors, art imaging devices and navigation systems allow him to autonomously move around, recognising young patients and avoiding obstacles.

X2AIX2AI founders Eugene Bann (left) and Michiel Rauws (right) intrigue school children with Karim's automatic responses at Jusoor school, located within a Syrian refugee community in Al Marj, Lebanon. According to the UN, over 3 million Syrian refugees are now in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, with millions more displaced within Syria. To help with this crisis, artificial intelligence startup X2AI is in the middle of a two week stay in Beirut, Lebanon, where it's piloting the use of artificial intelligence as a psychotherapy treatment for refugees. Partnering with Singularity University and the Field Innovation Team, X2AI is pitching the psychotherapy bot (named Karim) to aid workers and refugee communities. X2AIX2AI founder and CTO Eugene Bann watches on as a student from Jusoor school has a conversation with Karim in Arabic, and his first interaction with an AI.

After World War II, Britain was a hotbed of pioneering computer research. Work done on automatic ways to crack codes and spot enemy aircraft meant it had a skilled cadre of engineers and scientists equipped with the knowledge to create powerful and practical computers. The machines that resulted, the Manchester Mark I, Edsac and the Ace, are now well known. Even Colossus, a secret during wartime and for decades after, is now widely recognised as the world's first programmable, electronic digital computer. But not all the UK's pioneers and pioneering computers are as well-known.

Elliptic, a blockchain intelligence firm that uses machine learning to root out fraudulent blockchain transactions, has raised 5 million from private equity investors. The funding round was led by Paladin Capital Group and included participation from Santander InnoVentures and others. The company uses graph analysis and machine learning to identify illicit activity in blockchain transactions, and provides a variety of compliance and securities services related to distributed ledger technology. Interactive gaming company Pivit used distributed ledger technology provided by Digital Asset Holdings to issue a portion of its latest 5 million funding round. Elliptic's technology was used to ensure that the digitally issued securities always remain under the control of Pivit and its investors.

There is huge potential for deep machine learning to become a valuable asset in the intelligence gathering space, according to Pentagon Deputy Secretary Robert Work -- it could ultimately allow U.S. forces to get an edge in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL, IS) by providing greater insights into their networks and practices. Work made the statement during a roughly hour-long talk called Securing Tomorrow, held March 30 by the Washington Post, where he addressed some of the threat concerns facing the United States and the strategy the Department of Defense is deploying to overcome them. Moderated by Post columnist David Ignatius, the discussion also focused on how the behemoth agency is approaching new technologies and the perceived threats being seen from top international competitors, like Russia and China. "Without question, we are absolutely certain, that the use of deep learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIS as a network and a better understanding of how we can target it precisely and lead to its defeat." The evaluative capabilities and intelligence gathering promise of deep machine learning, Work said, has already shown great potential through the use of publicly available materials on social media, which paint a clearer picture of the events surrounding the downing of Malaysian passenger airliner MH17.

Kinba has only just started on the front desk of King's College but the students are already in love with their new receptionist who can see, hear and have a stab at speaking. Under normal circumstances that would be unremarkable – but Kinba is a robot. Kinba, who has yet to be assigned a gender, took up its new post last week alongside the London university's existing – human – receptionist Camilla Templing at its building on the Strand. "Kinba's generated a real buzz of excitement about the place, to see it moving and speaking. People are coming and taking pictures and talking to it," Ms Templing says.

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about Inbenta, a provider of Natural Language Search technology for intelligent assistant and web self-service technologies. I spoke with global marketing director Julie Casson and Kelly Foster, linguist, to gain insight into a company I didn't know much about. Inbenta originated in Barcelona, and now has offices in the United States, France, Singapore, Brazil and the Netherlands. Casson and Foster are located at the office in Sunnyvale, California. Prior to our conversation, I knew that Inbenta offers intelligent assistant technology and an extremely innovative 3D avatar, called Victoria.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your gullible 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. "Our new technology solves all your problems linked to writing and typing. The automated cell uses an advanced technology that recognizes the human voice and types the exact same text on the device of your choice. The technology is available for pen, pencil, keyboard, laptop, smartphone and tablet."

People often ask how we've been able to learn about and cover so many different and diverse topics in machine learning (using at least three different programming languages – Python, Matlab, and R) and generally achieve such prominence in the community, all this in a relatively short time. Today we finally give a definitive answer. There's no Zygmunt the Polish economist ever willing to relocate to San Francisco. And the "we" that we always use in the posts is not majestic plural. We are three Chinese PhD students: Ah, Hai and Wang.

It doesn't look like a place to make groundbreaking discoveries that change the trajectory of society. But in these simulated, claustrophobic corridors, Demis Hassabis thinks he can lay the foundations for software that's smart enough to solve humanity's biggest problems. "Our goal's very big," says Hassabis, whose level-headed manner can mask the audacity of his ideas. He leads a team of roughly 200 computer scientists and neuroscientists at Google's DeepMind, the London-based group behind the AlphaGo software that defeated the world champion at Go in a five-game series earlier this month, setting a milestone in computing. It's supposed to be just an early checkpoint in an effort Hassabis describes as the Apollo program of artificial intelligence, aimed at "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else."