Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your dance-challenged 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. SNUMAX is a "multi-functional soft robot" developed by Seoul National University's Biorobotics Laboratory, which won the RoboSoft Grand Challenge this year. "Boomf is the noise a marshmallow makes when it falls through your letterbox and lands on your doormat."

There's a grey period that autonomous car developers don't often discuss between humans controlling cars and AI controlling cars, where humans in autonomous cars will need to stay on high alert to avoid accidents with terrible human drivers. Some suggestions have been put forward on how to tackle this intersection, like using visual or aural alerts. The Tesla Model S, which provides a highway self-driving system, alerts the driver through a series of beeps, warning them to take control of the car. However, according to the Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany, all of the current alerts systems are ineffective. A team of researchers said to Spectrum IEEE that vibrotactile display alerts are by far the best way to get the driver's attention, because they are hard to ignore.

Despite heightened tensions between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the FBI-Apple standoff, the Department of Defense is increasingly looking to Silicon Valley to help it develop artificial intelligence capabilities. Just this week, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made yet another trip to the Silicon Valley, the fourth such trip since he took the DoD helm last year. During this trip, Carter visited the Pentagon new Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, facility, reported the New York Times. During a speech there, Carter again discussed his Third Offset strategy, which looks to high-tech weapons to give the U.S. military an edge of China and Russia in the future. The first and second offset, in case you are wondering, refer to previous eras in which DoD used technology to compensate for a smaller military – the 1950s use of nuclear weapons to deter superior Warsaw Pact forces and the 1970s and 1980s when the Pentagon looked to improved conventional weapons technology, such as cruise missiles, to compensate for a smaller force posture.

It's a little known but often dangerous problem: each year, 3,500 people in the U.S. -- mostly young children -- swallow button batteries. Normally, these batteries pass through the body without incident. But if they come into prolonged contact with esophagus or stomach tissue, the results can be harmful: the batteries can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, which burns through body tissue. A postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shuhei Miyashita brought up this hazard to Daniela Rus, the professor who leads the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A simple experiment proved how hazardous the little batteries can be.

General Motors has completed its acquisition of Cruise Automation, the 3-year-old San Francisco startup that may provide a critical piece of technology in the quest to bring a fully autonomous car to market soon. The automaker won't disclose the final price or other terms until this summer when it reports second-quarter financial results. Multiple media sources have reported that GM is paying at least 1 billion for Cruise. "General Motors is pleased to announce it has completed the closing of the acquisition of Cruise Automation," the company said in a statement. The deal's consummation had been threatened by a pair of lawsuits involving Cruise cofounder and CEO Kyle Vogt and Jeremy Guillory, who said he was an early partner in the company.

There are many possible reasons that could explain this problem. There could be a technical explanation -- we implemented backpropagation incorrectly -- or, we chose a learning rate that was too high, which in turn let to the problem that we were overshooting the local minima of the cost function. The first thing I would always do is implementing "gradient checking" to make sure that the implementation is correct. Gradient checking is very easy to implement, and it is a good first diagnostic; here, we just compare the analytical solution to a numerically approximated gradient. Even better yet is to use the 2-point solution with /-?

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) plays a huge role in technology, education and research. AI is complex, but it is more efficient and reliable than humans when it comes to the workforce because it is fast and it doesn't get tired. According to new reports, AI investment continues to grow. Most of the things we see about AI springs from science fiction movies.

Last week, a research team showed off a new project that aims to teach a Google AI system to be more conversational by learning from thousands of romance and fantasy novels. A fine sample to replicate from, you say? Wait until you read the AI's results. Quartz found the paper which details the AI's response when presented with two sentences, and asked to create additional sentences to link the two sentiments, i.e. "I'm fine" to "But you need to talk to me now." Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

Gel1…..I've been here 6 months, mostly watching and learning. Lots of smart people on the site and I've learned a lot from Phil and many others. I have to thank Phil and the many contruibutors for a 80% profit for 2009. I have learned a lot and am still learning ( even occasionally about political issues - ha!) Peace of mind / I have a portfolio mainly consisting of long term long calls, short term short calls and puts, and long term BCS. Three years, ago when I started my journey on this board I would be freaking out panicking as to what to do, as many of the short calls are ITM, Three years later (today) I look at the screen and serenely process the information. Three years ago, I inevitably made the wrong decisions which cost me a lot of money. Three years on I calmly roll the positions to whatever makes sense. I guess they call that the power of education. Phil, i wanted to thank you again for helping me protect future stock allocations at work - finally, i feel like i am owning my own destiny with stocks vs. letting the market dictate what you get – thanks again. Phil/BCS - Didn't realise they traded here.

Scientists have created the world's tiniest practical engines, and these light-powered machines could one day power microscopic robots small enough to enter living cells, the researchers say. Delicious produce, fresh from farmer robot. At least, that's what Japan hopes. Although Google is selling Boston Dynamics to distance itself from "terrifying" humanoid robots, there's still plenty of robot projects underway. Don't lift with your legs or your back.