The Valley's affinity for robotics shows no signs of cooling. Technical enhancements through innovations like AI/ML, compute power and big data utilization continue to drive new performance milestones, efficiencies and use cases. Despite the old saying, "hardware is hard," investment in the robotics space continues to expand. Money is pouring in across robotics' billion-dollar sub verticals, including industrial and labor automation, drone delivery, machine vision and a wide range of others. According to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, 2018 saw new highs for the number of venture deals and total invested capital in the space, with roughly $5 billion in investment coming from nearly 400 deals.

Delivery robots suffered a setback this week when New York City made it clear they're not welcome there. On Monday, November 25, just a few days after a FedEx "SameDay Bot" autonomous robot was spotted trundling along a Manhattan street, lawyers for the New York City Department of Transportation sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter to the shipping giant, CNN reported. The letter warned FedEx that its last-mile delivery robot breached multiple traffic rules, adding that any further outings made by the machine could result in serious consequences for the firm. "You are hereby directed to immediately cease and desist operating your SameDay Bots on the streets and sidewalks in the City of New York," lawyers said in the letter. "Failure to do so may result in the seizure of the property, notices of violation and/or the commencement of legal action."

Peggy Smedley: For you, what are the most interesting trends that you see? You and I have talked in the past about the IoT (Internet of Things) and I know that you have a lot of vision, a lot of examples that you look at when you think about cloud and edge and we talk about manufacturing and all these things in vertical markets, but for listeners right now, based on investments you guys [Microsoft] are making, what do you see are the most interesting trends? Sam George: Well, I think if you zoom the telescope way back out and look at the very big picture, what we're seeing across all of these vertical markets, whether it's manufacturing or agriculture, smart cites, smart energy. If you take a look at what's happening with all of these, there's a set of disruptive technologies that are fundamentally transforming how those industries function. Cloud was a big catalyst for that and I'd say, very well established at this point. And then IoT, a couple of years ago, really started hitting the scene, building on top of cloud and giving these businesses unprecedented visibility if they were able to take advantage of it back in the early days. Virtually all aspects of their business are able to sense things in the physical world, in realtime, that they weren't able to before. And then while the IoT was happening, edge computing started happening too, which was a normal and natural optimization, where as I connect and start collecting data from these billions of devices that are sensing across all of these different industries that are sensing things that are happening, it's natural to start taking some of the computing that you were doing in the cloud and some of the services that you were taking advantage of and pushing those right out and distributing those right out to the devices themselves for a variety of reasons, whether that's latency concerns or security concerns or anything else. We see this wonderful trend of AI that is powering really new breakthrough capabilities across all of these industries. AI is a great example, where as it takes advantage of those proceeding waves, edge computing and the IoT and cloud. AI can now run in a distributed fashion as well.

Titled "Beginners' Artificial Intelligence and Python Programming", the book was written by the convener of Data Science Nigeria, Olubayo Adekanmbi, …

They promised us the robots wouldn't attack… In what seems like dialogue lifted straight from the pages of a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Stanford claim they've developed an algorithmic framework that guarantees AI won't misbehave. The framework uses'Seldonian' algorithms, named for the protagonist of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, a continuation of the fictional universe where the author's "Laws of Robotics" first appeared. According to the team's research, the Seldonian architecture allows developers to define their own operating conditions in order to prevent systems from crossing certain thresholds while training or optimizing. In essence, this should allow developers to keep AI systems from harming or discriminating against humans. Deep learning systems power everything from facial recognition to stock market predictions.

In the race for artificial intelligence dominance, it is currently just a two horse race when looked at on a national level. As our chart shows, when looking at patent applications, investment, talent, research and companies in the sector, the United States and China are top of the charts when it comes to these key metrics. Between these two leaders, there are areas in which one or the other is far stronger, with China well ahead in terms of investment and financing - China accounted for 60 percent of global investment since 2013. The U.S. on the other hand is most dominant from the perspective of the number of companies operating in the field. This chart shows the countries most dominant in key areas of artificial intelligence in 2018.

Incorporating machine learning into predictive analytics has been in high demand that provides businesses the competitive edge. This hot topic is highly subscribed by undergraduates all over the world. However, being formally introduced the concepts and techniques of machine learning in universities may prove extremely daunting for the average undergraduate. During my undergraduate winter exchange in McGill University, I enrolled myself in their Applied Machine Learning course. Yes, it was foolish of me to enroll in a graduate-level course!

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and automation will almost certainly strip away thousands of jobs from humans over the next few decades. That's a pressing question--and one that the Brookings Institution recently tried to tackle with an in-depth analysis. Since A.I. will impact certain industries harder than others, those states with high concentrations of those industries may end up powerfully affected. But states with heavy concentrations of knowledge workers and managers could also end up impacted over the long term, thanks to A.I. that increasingly takes over management, programming, and customer service. Washington, California, and the states along the Boston-Washington, D.C. corridor are ground zero for this flavor of automation. Sign up for a free Dice profile, add your resume, discover great career insights and set your tech career in motion.

Each level is expansive enough to be its own course.

One of the world's top human champions of Go has decided to retire from playing the strategy game professionally, citing AI as a reason he feels he can no longer compete. South Korean Go player Lee Sedol gained international notoriety in March 2016 when he took on Google Deepmind's artificial intelligence AlphaGo. The machine won four out of five matches against Sedol, proving that AI is advanced enough to beat humanity at one of its most complex abstract strategy games. Sedol did not hide his sense of failure after his losses. "I don't know how to start or what to say today, but I think I would have to express my apologies first," he said after the third match.