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.

Powers planned by the Government aiming to pave the way for commercial space flights in Britain will be included in the Queen's Speech alongside a raft of investments in transport infrastructure. The legislation, according to Department for Transport (DfT), will allow the launch of satellites from the UK for the first time, horizontal flights to the edge of space for scientific experiments and the establishment of spaceports in regions across Britain. The Queen's Speech, which has been delayed by two days due to the current instability in British politics, will also include measures to improve conditions for the 100,000 drivers of plug-in vehicles by "removing barriers that are preventing more drivers switching to electric". "As things stand, those wanting to use publicly-accessible charging points may need to register with several different companies that run them," the Department for Transport added. "The planned legislation will include measures to ensure drivers need register only once to make full use of the existing infrastructure."

The Sunnyvale, California-based company makes farming machines. "I bet we're the only startup with a tractor behind our offices," CEO Jorge Heraud says. Nevertheless, it is still very much a tech startup. Blue River's machines are robots that help farmers manage their fields more efficiently. The old-school approach is to drench an entire field in weed-killing chemicals, but Blue River combines computer vision and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to spray selectively.

Come join us at Dev Bootcamp for a social learning mixer infused with co-founders and leaders in the VR/AR/AI space! Our guest speakers will share more on how they are helping to build the future of VR/AR/AI. Take advantage of this opportunity to network, collaborate and innovate with our amazing community! We'll have demo equipment onsite for you to try out these new realities and really experience how transformational this technology is and can be! Goretti Campbell is the founder of SF Women in Tech has been immersed in the technology field for the last 3 years under the guidance of Dave Martinez Ventures.

Last week I looked at Singular Value Decomposition unsupervised machine learning technique as part of a four-part series on data science concepts for beginners. Remember that unsupervised machine learning is data driven rather than task driven (supervised machine learning). Today we'll be staying in the dimension reduction part of unsupervised machine learning as shown in the Cheat-sheet below and will talk about principal component analysis or PCA. In a similar manner to SVD, PCA is trying to reduce the number of dimensions for data exploration. The PCA method is trying to maximize variance of the data to make a predictive model and converts a set of possibly correlated variables into a set of linearly uncorrelated variables.

Today's guest is Sean Lane, CEO of CrossChx, and we have a great chat about artificial intelligence. President Trump met with Juan Manuel the President of Columbia yesterday and held a joint news conference. The President emphasized counter drug trafficking in partnership with Columbia. Other key points include the President's claims that illegal border crossings in the U.S. are down 73%, he wants the U.S. to work with South American countries on the Venezuelan problem, and also promised that MS-13 gang members will be gone from the U.S. soon. President Trump also took to Twitter today as he tweeted, "this is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" and "with all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special counsel!" The tweets were in response to Wednesday's news that the Department of Justice appointment former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.

Laura met George in the pages of Reader's Digest. In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George Price discovered an equation that explained the evolution of altruism, then overnight turned into an extreme altruist, giving away everything up to and including his life. A theatre director, Laura Farnworth recognized the dramatic potential of the story. It was a tragedy of Greek proportions--the revelation of his own equation forcing Price to look back on his selfish life and mend his ways, even though choosing to live selflessly would lead inexorably to his death. But as she delved into his life and science over the next five years, Farnworth discovered a lot more than a simple morality tale. Born in New York in 1922, George Price realized pretty early on that he was destined for greatness. In a class full of smart kids he was one of the smartest, especially with numbers. He was in the chess club, obviously, and his mathematical brain was naturally drawn to science.

Sweden's answer to the F-35 has taken its maiden flight, maker Saab has revealed. During the 40-minute flight over the eastern parts of Östergötland, the latest Gripen executed a series of maneuvers to test its systems, including extending and retracting its landing gear. The Gripen E'Smart Fighter' is aimed at markets not yet cleared to buy the troubled Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The latest version of the Gripen fighter jet has been unveiled by Swedish aircraft maker, Saab. The Gripen E 39-8 prototype has a 15.2 metre (50ft) long body and a wingspan of 8.6 metres (28ft).

Marketers are increasingly using more channels to reach customers, pondering their strategy for artificial intelligence and augmenting email, which delivers solid returns, with new technologies. Those takeaways were among the highlights of a survey conducted by Salesforce. Executives walked through the findings with a customer at Salesforce's New York office. Salesforce's State of Marketing Report is based on a survey of 3,500 marketing pros in the US, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The survey was based on Salesforce customers, but likely applies to a broader set of marketing professionals.

"Imagine a future anthropologist with access to trillions of photos of people--taken over centuries and across the world--and equipped with effective tools for analyzing these photos to derive insights. What kinds of new questions can be answered?" This is the dream that has inspired Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Their thinking is that the millions of photos uploaded each day to social media provide a fascinating window into the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape societies around the world. With powerful enough machine intelligence, they say, it ought to be possible to mine this mother lode of data for deep insights into our civilization.