Comcast's vice president of AI product, Jeanine Heck, speaks with TechRepublic's Tonya Hall about the success of an AI voice remote product, integrated with deep learning. The following is an edited transcript of the interview. Tonya Hall: It's push to talk, and not always listening. Jeanine Heck: Thank you, Tonya. Hall: So, what is your role entail, exactly? Heck: My role is really to be a product manager, and that entails working with the engineering team to ensure that we're building products that are valuable to our customers, and so it's important for me in my role to understand the customers needs, how they use our products today, how they may want to use our products tomorrow, and also making sure that the products are very competitive in the marketplace.

Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for--by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gave the world the term "paradigm shift." As Morris tells the story in his recent book, The Ashtray, Kuhn was antagonized by Morris' suggestions that Kuhn was a megalomaniac and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an assault on truth and progress. To say the least, Morris, then 24, was already the iconoclast who would go on to make some of the most original documentary films of our time. After launching the career he was suited for with The Gates of Heaven in 1978, a droll affair about pet cemeteries, Morris earned international acclaim with The Thin Blue Line, which led to the reversal of a murder conviction of a prisoner who had been on death row. In 2004, Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, a dissection of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a major architect of the Vietnam War. His 2017 film, Wormwood, a miniseries on Netflix, centers on the mystery surrounding a scientist who in 1975 worked on a biological warfare program for the Army, and suspiciously fell to his death from a hotel room. The Ashtray--Morris explains the title in our interview below--is as arresting and idiosyncratic as Morris' films.

My Uncle John is a long haul tractor trailer truck driver. For each new assignment, he picks his load up from a local company early in the morning and then sets off on a lengthy, enduring cross-country trek across the United States that takes him days to complete. John is a nice, outgoing guy, who carries a smart, witty demeanor. He also fits the "cowboy of the highway" stereotype to a T, sporting a big ole' trucker cap, red-checkered flannel shirt, and a faded pair of Levi's that have more than one splotch of oil stain from quick and dirty roadside fixes. He also loves his country music. I caught up with John a few weeks ago during a family dinner and asked him about his trucking job.

Elon Musk says he is unable to work proper hours, even if his habits are causing him serious damage in his personal life. The Tesla boss has been called on by people including Arianna Huffington, who said that he needed to adopt a healthier work-life balance. But he said such a decision was not an option. The comments came after Mr Musk conducted a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times in which he detailed the stress of running his company and the ways it was ruining his personal life. He broke down as he described not celebrating his own birthday and nearly missing his brother's wedding.

On this episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Moore talks about the future of tech education as fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning take center stage. Moore, the dean of CMU's computer science school, says he's "concerned" that anti-immigrant fervor will deter the next generation of great computer scientists from coming to America, although CMU has not yet seen an impact on its application numbers. "I think it's short-term, and I haven't seen any craziness, though of course, I'm frightened that it'll happen -- on this question of getting really the strongest folks over," Moore said. "If we appear to have a society which doesn't welcome folks from elsewhere then of course any sane brilliant scientist will end up going to Canada or Singapore or Zurich because they'll be able to get the best of both worlds." "Once you're living in an academic community or in a software development office for an exciting company, usually in day-to-day interactions this doesn't come up," he added. "You're so focused on some particular mission. But that perception -- especially among someone who's maybe 16 or 17 in anywhere from Turkey to China to England -- is something I'm concerned about." On the new podcast, he also talks about the often-forgotten importance of electrical and computer engineers, who will develop the sensors that make machine learning advance; how educational programs have been complicit in the lack of diversity in tech; and why he's personally pessimistic that self-driving cars, one of Carnegie Mellon's areas of expertise, will be ready by the early 2020s, as some have predicted. You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Below, we've shared a lightly edited transcript of Kara's full conversation with Andrew. Kara Swisher: Today, I'm delighted to have Andrew Moore on the podcast. He's the dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, which was ranked No. 1 in the world by U.S. News and World Report. And he was previously a vice president of engineering at Google where he was in charge of Google Shopping. Andrew Moore: Happy to be here, thank you. I wanna get your background. I've had various computer scientists on the show who are teaching and like that, and I'd love to get sort of the academic perspective, but you've been in the fray, also. So just let's give your background, where you came from and how you got to Carnegie Mellon and then we'll talk about what's going on there. I grew up in a seaside town called Bournemouth in South of England, and there, in the late '80s, I really got into creating video games, like a lot of kids at the time.

Joanna Bryson (@j2bryson) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the University of Bath. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics, and collaborative cognition. In 2010 Bryson published her most controversial work, "Robots Should Be Slaves" and has helped the EPSRC to define the Principles of Robotics in 2010. She has also consulted The Red Cross on autonomous weapons and is a member of an All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence. Joanna is focused on "Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems".

Mathieu d'Aquin is a Professor of Informatics specialised in data analytics and semantic technologies at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics of the National University of Ireland Galway. He was previously Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, where he led the Data Science Group. In this interview, he speaks about research on semantic web technologies and specific application of web data technologies, which are two key areas of his work interest. You have been working for years on Semantic Web/Linked Data technologies. What will shape our future the most?

LaToya Smith was 29 years old when she died from skin cancer. The young doctor had gotten her degree in podiatry from Rosalind Franklin University, in Chicago, just four years prior, and had recently finished a medical mission in Eritrea. But a diagnosis of melanoma in 2010 meant she would work in private practice for only a year before her death. As a black woman, LaToya reflected a stark imbalance in skin-cancer statistics in America. While fair-skinned people are at the highest risk for contracting skin cancer, the mortality rate for African Americans is considerably higher: Their five-year survival rate is 73 percent, compared with 90 percent for white Americans, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.

My AI Interview Questions articles for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn, Ebay, Twitter, Walmart, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce and Uber have been very helpful to the readers. As a followup, next couple of articles were on how to prepare for these interviews split into two parts, Part 1 and Part 2. If you want to find suggestions on how to showcase your AI work please visit Acing AI Portfolios. Zillow is a gigantic spatial database. The GIS team within Zillow works on interesting problems like spatial ETL, normalization of geospatial data and establishing geo-spatial relationships between data points. Very few companies in the world have these kind of problems to solve.

Maria Pocovi slides her laptop over to me with the webcam switched on. My face stares back at me, overlaid with a grid of white lines that map the contours of my expression. Next to it is a shaded window that tracks six "core emotions": happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness. Each time my expression shifts, a measurement bar next to each emotion fluctuates, as if my feelings were an audio signal. When I look back at Pocovi, I get the sense she knows exactly what I'm thinking with one glance. Petite with a welcoming smile, Pocovi, the founder of Emotion Research Lab in Valencia, Spain, is a global entrepreneur par excellence.