Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your nebulous 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. Tend.ai makes "cloud robotics for machine tending" a reality. Our system uses artificial intelligence powered by cloud computing to read machines' displays and press machines' buttons just like a human would.

Violence is everywhere in video games, but sex is still strangely taboo. On the off chance that sexual content is featured in a game, it tends to be weird, completely isolated from the rest of the gameplay and devoid of intimacy. But who says sex in games can't also be richly rewarding and even educational? For Robert Yang, indie developer and educator at the New York University Game Center, sex in video games can be a good thing. Yang's games have gone viral for their sophisticated, but lighthearted, approach to what happens between consenting adults.

That's exactly what happened to 38-year-old Stéphanie Creignou, who unfortunately suffered injuries when the drone fell from the sky and crashed directly into her head. She's yet to get back to work, and as a result of her injuries, she was forced to cancel a vacation she had already planned with her husband. You can see it in the video footage captured by VTOL-X Drones, a professional drone provider that was, in an ironic turn of events, hired by event organizers to obtain aerial footage of the event. Drone operator Rosaire Turcotte is unsure of how he lost control of the drone or how the incident occurred. In an interview with VAT News, he attests that he has "zero explanation" and believes he "acted in the safest way possible."

Artificial intelligence may be the new face of medical diagnostics. For the first time, a flavor of A.I. called deep learning is being implemented in new ultrasound imaging equipment to aid in breast exams and help patients avoid unnecessary biopsies. A new feature in Samsung Medison's ultrasound system uses a deep-learning algorithm to make recommendations about whether a breast abnormality is benign or cancerous. The "S-Detect for Breast" feature is now included in an upgrade to the company's RS80A ultrasound system and is commercially available in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Korea and is pending FDA approval in the U.S., according to PR manager Doug Kim. Deep learning relies on large amounts of data to inform complex decision-making algorithms, has aided in everything from speech and image recognition software to pharmaceutical research.

Twitter is investing in machine learning with the 150 million acquisition of Magic Pony Technology, a London-based firm that developed machine learning techniques for visual processing. Calling machine learning "the core of everything we build at Twitter," CEO Jack Dorsey blogged that the buy builds on other investments his company has made: an acquisition of Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. Machine learning makes it easier for Twitter users to create, share and discover "so that every time you open Twitter you're immersed in the most relevant news, stories, and events for you," he said. Magic Pony's team will join Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists and machine learning researchers "dedicated to building a product in which people can easily find new experiences to share and participate in." Twitter has 310 monthly active users and 3,800 employees.

Optimization for machine learning is essential to ensure that data mining models can learn from training data in order to generalize to future test data. Data mining models can have millions of parameters that depend on the training data and, in general, have no analytic definition. In such cases, effective models with good generalization capabilities can only be found by using optimization strategies. Optimization algorithms come in all shapes and sizes, just like anything in life. Attempting to create a single optimization algorithm for all problems would be as foolhardy as seeking to create a single motor vehicle for all drivers --there is a reason we have semi-trucks, automobiles, motorcycles, etc.

Ask most people outside academia or Silicon Valley what comes to mind when they hear the term "machine learning" and you're likely to get a response that involves a movie like "The Matrix" or "Ex Machina." You're less likely to hear how it's a great tool for fraud detection or supply chain optimization, and that's too bad. Machine learning has a tremendous range of business applications, from optimizing data centers to predicting fine wine price changes to retail market basket analysis. With that in mind, I hope to cut through the science fiction clutter and misconceptions so you can consider how machine learning relates to your business. Many have heard about Andrew Ng's popular graduate level machine learning course at Stanford, now available on Coursera.

Peter Clark is a senior research manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, overseeing Project Aristo, an effort to build an AI system with the ability to answer questions from standardized exams, starting on 4th grade science tests, with the goal of advancing to higher grades in the future. Clark was the featured speaker this week for the 2016 corporate kickoff event for Geeks Give Back, an annual philanthropic campaign presented by Bank of America in partnership with GeekWire, benefitting the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program. Clark gave an overview of the state of artificial intelligence, and his work at AI2, before fielding questions from me and members of the audience. Continue reading for highlights from the discussion, and stay tuned this fall for more information on how participating in this year's Geeks Give Back campaign. Todd Bishop: People look at artificial intelligence, and traditionally they think of a robot or a machine, but the internet is essentially the world brain.

It is not every day you see a runaway robot causing traffic chaos in a city centre - but in one Russian suburb is has happened twice in the last week. The robot, named Promobot, was being put through its paces at a research lab in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region. In its first escape, the robot, designed to avoid obstacles and to turn around when it reached a boundary, had been left walking around an outside yard. This is the hilarious moment a runaway robot causes traffic chaos in a city centre. The robot - called Promobot - was being put through its paces at a research lab in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region Promobot - short for Promotional Robot - is a unique robot created by Russian scientists and is designed to work in customer relations.

Unfortunately, personal bias is a fundamental component of human nature – in other words, it's not something we can avoid. No matter how self-aware we become, every decision we make is undermined by subjective opinion and, therefore, bias, (or subconscious view perhaps is another more common term) – one of the reasons why companies are having so much trouble improving diversity and inclusion. According to Fast Company, that's why hiring managers are turning to the data-based, objective opinions of A.I. While we can't remove bias from our own brains, we can program computers to outsmart it. Thanks to a technology called machine learning, A.I. programmes can crunch massive data sets in order to identify subtle patterns, thereby pinpointing the exact places where bias crops up in the hiring process.