Allow me to get a bit philosophical here: History is only smooth in retrospect. Few earth-shaking shifts are inevitable. Change only looks easy from a rocking chair. Which is all to say, it was a rocky week for electric vehicles, the motorized transports that are supposed to help us save the planet. Tesla underperformed in its first quarter production and delivery numbers, pulling that one-step-back routine after taking two steps forward in late 2018.

Delivery robots have been popping up in high-end hotels. Now they are making their way to a younger clientele. PATRICK MADDEN, BYLINE: George Mason University looks like any other big college campus - tall buildings, dorms, green grass and wide sidewalks where streams of students make their way to classes, except here on this campus, there's something not so ordinary - robots. MADDEN: This is one of several dozen Starship food delivery robots here on campus. Picture a cooler on wheels that resembles R2-D2, if you're a "Star Wars" fan.

At George Mason University in Virginia, a fleet of several dozen autonomous robots deliver food to students on campus. At George Mason University in Virginia, a fleet of several dozen autonomous robots deliver food to students on campus. George Mason University looks like any other big college campus with its tall buildings, student housing, and manicured green lawns – except for the robots. This Northern Virginia university recently set up several dozen meal delivery robots from Starship Technologies to make it easier for students to access food. Multiple colleges across the country have deployed delivery robots – including University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., and Northern Arizona University – but George Mason University is the first college in the United States to incorporate robots into its student dining plan. The school is partnering with food service provider Sodexo for the program.

Hundreds of the drones could be ready for action in just a couple of years, the firm behind the project says. The two-seater drone has been comprehensively tested and is ready for mass production, boasted Derrick Xiong, co-founder of Chinese drone firm EHang. However, the machine is not yet allowed to fly in Austrian airspace, so was restricted to "hops" inside the stadium.

"Ethical AI" has become a new corporate buzz phrase, slapped on internal review committees, fancy job titles, research projects and philanthropic initiatives. The moves are meant to address concerns over racial and gender bias emerging in facial recognition and other AI systems, as well as address anxieties about job losses to the technology and its use by law enforcement and the military.

DINARD, FRANCE - Foreign ministers of Group of Seven nations on Saturday pushed North Korea to continue denuclearization negotiations with the United States while vowing to maintain pressure on Pyongyang to encourage it to give up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. In a communique issued after a two-day meeting in Dinard, western France, the ministers also expressed serious concern about the situation in the East and South China seas -- a veiled criticism of China's militarization of outposts in disputed areas of the South China Sea and its attempts to undermine Japan's control of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. The Senkakus are administered by Japan, but claimed by China and Taiwa, which call them the Diaoyu and Tiaoyutai, respectively. During the meeting, some G7 members touched on China's expanding global ambitions through its signature Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project, a Japanese official said. But the communique makes no reference to the initiative in an apparent effort to demonstrate unity among the group.

In debates about the future of work, technology is often portrayed as the villain. One recent study calculated that 38 percent of jobs in the United States were at a "high risk" of being automated during the next decade. In the construction industry, predictions are especially dire: estimates of robot-fueled joblessness range from 24 percent in Britain to 41percent in Germany. Borja García de Soto is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), a Global Network Assistant Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Director of NYUAD's S.M.A.R.T. Construction Research Group. There is no question that automation will change the way people work, but for some sectors of the economy, change is long overdue.

According to the motto: "A picture says more than a thousand words" some useful slides with a short explanation are shown below. Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data; and the process of applying those patterns towards effective decision making. In other words, analytics can be understood as the connective tissue between data and effective decision making, within an organization. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Organizations may apply analytics to business data to describe, predict, and improve business performance.

Our April meetup features a presentation, Human-Centered Machine Learning, by Patrick Hall of H2O.ai. After a half-hour of networking and refreshments courtesy of meetup sponsor Allegis Group, our program starts at 6:30 pm. Patrick's presentation illustrates how to combine innovations from several sub-disciplines of machine learning research to train understandable, observationally fair, trustable, and accurate predictive modeling systems. Techniques from research into fair models, directly interpretable Bayesian or constrained machine learning models, and post-hoc explanations can be used to train transparent, observationally fair, and accurate models. Additional techniques from fairness research can be used to check for disparate impact in model predictions and to preprocess data and post-process predictions to ensure the demographic parity of predictive models.

One of the most common applications of machine learning today is in recommendation algorithms. Netflix and YouTube use them to push you new shows and videos; Google and Facebook use them to rank the content in your search results and news feed. While these algorithms offer a great deal of convenience, they have some undesirable side effects. You've probably heard of them before: filter bubbles and echo chambers. Concern about these effects is not new.