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. At the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, roboticists have spent the last 14 years honing a robot navigation system modeled on the brains of rats. This biologically inspired approach, they hope, could help robots navigate dynamic environments without requiring advanced, costly sensors and computationally intensive algorithms.

Artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the $445 billion beauty industry by creating AI-powered shopping experiences despite the widespread brick-and-mortar retail crisis. "Cracking e-commerce for beauty has been notoriously difficult compared to other verticals," Headliner Labs co-founder Caroline Klatt told International Business Times. "Getting a recommendation from a stylist is the number one driver of sales in stores." New York-based Headliner is just one of many companies creating custom AI chatbots for beauty brands. To understand just how dramatic this high-tech shift really is, let's recall how people got beauty products just 15 years ago.

This article was written by Harry Chiang, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized." Over the past few years, news articles have casually floated the term'Artificial Intelligence' around at an increasing rate. It's one of those buzzwords that somehow finds its way in to every tech-related conversation. Even the least tech-savvy person has a vague notion of what it is. The problem is, some of the more tech-savvy person don't have a much clearer notion of what it is either. The definition of AI ranges and has vague boundaries.

Design and AI: Where do we start? Toronto is poised to become a hot spot for the fast-growing field of AI. While most of the current practitioner level conversation is engineering-centric, we're interested in the intersection of AI and design. How is AI shaping human experiences? What does the work of designers look like in a future augmented with AI?

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. They work in multiple stages where the result of each stage may influence the result of the next stage. Both procedures proceed according to a given linear order of the alternatives, an agenda. We obtain the following results for both voting procedures: On the one hand, deciding whether one can make a specific alternative win by reporting insincere preferences by the fewest number of voters, the Coalitional Manipulation problem, or whether there is a suitable ordering of the agenda, the Agenda Control problem, takes polynomial time. On the other hand, our experimental studies with real-world data indicate that most preference profiles cannot be manipulated by only few voters and a successful agenda control is typically impossible. If the voters' preferences are incomplete, then deciding whether an alternative can possibly win is NP-hard for both procedures. Whilst deciding whether an alternative necessarily wins is coNP-hard for the amendment procedure, it is polynomial-time solvable for the successive procedure.

Rats are nimble navigators, able to find their way around, under, and over obstacles, and through the tightest spaces. Roboticists have long dreamed of giving their creations similar navigation skills. To be useful in the real world, robots must be able to find their way around on their own. Some are already learning to do that in homes, offices, warehouses, hospitals, and hotels--and in the case of self-driving cars, entire cities. Despite that progress, robots still struggle to perform the tasks for which they're designed even under mildly challenging conditions.

The move was the second time in a week that it shot down a pro-Syrian government aircraft in the sky. "The armed pro-regime Shaheed-129 UAV was shot down by a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle at approximately 12:30 a.m. Carla Babb, the Pentagon correspondent for Voice of America (VOA) tweeted Tuesday saying the sources have confirmed that the Iranian-made drone shot down by the U.S. fighter jet was being operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said the U.S. military shot down the Shahed 129 as it approached an established coalition combat outpost near al-Tanf in southeast Syria, where the U.S. is holding training sessions for local fighters against the Islamic State group, VOA reported. Officials also said that the shot Iranian aircraft was the same type of drone that a U.S. warplane had shot down June 8 after it attacked U.S.-backed fighters in southern Syria.

The spokesman of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ramazan Sharif speaks with media members at the conclusion of his press conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, June 20, 2017. Sharif, said all six ballistic missiles it launched on Syria hit their targets, according to "local sources and drone films." Iran fired ballistic missiles at IS targets in eastern Syria, in the province of Deir el-Zour, later on Sunday. The spokesman of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ramazan Sharif speaks with media members at the conclusion of his press conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, June 20, 2017. Sharif, said all six ballistic missiles it launched on Syria hit their targets, according to "local sources and drone films."

These and many other insights are from the Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution published last week. The report is available for download here (50 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The survey is based on interviews with 3,500 marketers worldwide conducted by Salesforce Research through a third-party survey firm in April 2017. The 3,500 respondents are full-time marketing leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, U.K., Ireland and U.S. Respondents were segmented into high-performing, moderate-performing or under-performing groups. High-performing organizations are defined as those who are "extremely satisfied" with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company's marketing investment.

WeRobotics Global has become a premier forum for social good robotics. The feedback featured below was unsolicited. On June 1, 2017, we convened our first, annual global event, bringing together 34 organizations to New York City (full list below) to shape the global agenda and future use of robotics in the social good sector. WeRobotics Global was kindly hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first donor to support our efforts. They opened the event with welcome remarks and turned it over to Patrick Meier from WeRobotics who provided an overview of WeRobotics and the big picture context for social sector robotics.