Social robots have had it tough recently. There are lots of reasons for this, but a big part of it is that it's a challenge to develop a social robot that's able to spark long-term user interest without driving initial expectations impractically high. This isn't just the case for commercial robots--social robots designed for long-term user interaction studies have the same sorts of issues. The Honda Research Institute is well aware of how tricky this is, and researchers there have been working on the design of a prototype social robot that achieves a "balance between human expectation, surface appearance, physical affordance, and robot functionality." It's called Haru, and Honda Research has provided a fascinating and detailed look into how they came up with its design.

In the late 1990s, two graduate students named in Stanford's computer science department set out to organize the world's information. Shortly thereafter, a visiting scholar named Mario Schlosser arrived on campus, set on figuring out how trust could be built into peer-to-peer networks. The original server used by the graduate students, who were now running a little outfit named Google, had formerly been crammed under a desk in the office Schlosser now used. Now, twenty years later, the graduate students have done OK, and they no longer need to borrow server space. But they've continually been stifled by one kind of information that's very hard to organize: health care data. The industry in America is a mess: yoked together with confusing regulations, perverse incentives, and computers running Windows XP. Meanwhile, Schlosser, has moved on from academia and created a company, called Oscar, with Joshua Kushner (brother of Jared) to try to solve those problems. The goal of Oscar is to do to health care what Uber did to the taxi industry: use smart digital technology to make everything faster and easier for customers, and then use the data gathered to build radically new services, which can collect more data that leads to new services. Google invested early in Oscar through its venture capital fund Capital G and its health services spinoff, Verily. Neither company will give exact figures, but it seems that Alphabet will now own roughly ten percent of the Oscar. One of Google earliest employees, Salar Kamangar, the former CEO of YouTube, will also join Oscar's board. I spoke with Schlosser for an hour on Monday about the deal, privacy, data, and whether, one day, we'll actually treat our gastroenteritis through an app.

One of the machine learning mistakes was the tragic death of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona by UBER's self-driving car. Initially there was a focus on the fact that machine learning made an error, but in fact, the answer was even more unsatisfying: the algorithm did detect the pedestrian but the car was programed to be less sensitive to potential false positives, causing the image and detection of the pedestrian to be ignored. As people become more aware of the number of decisions driven by artificial intelligence, some have raised a call for so-called "ethical AI." AI is not ethical, but our use of it and tuning definitely is. At FICO World 2018, I sat down with Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov to discuss the hot topics in the world of AI, and asked: What do you think of ethical AI? Watch the video below, and for more of my conversation with Garry Kasparov on AI go to www.fico.com/ai-analytics, Do I agree with Garry?

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. Paperspace offers products ranging from virtual desktops to high-end workstations for use across a host of areas, including animation studios to the infrastructure for machine learning and data science. ZDNet spoke to Paperspace CEO, Dillon Erb, to find out more. ZDNet: What's your company's background and where do you position yourself in the market?

Artificial intelligence is the buzzword for 2018 and it is being used everywhere and often to describe fairly mundane automation and analytics-driven processes. One of the earliest adoptions has been speech to text, for example in call centres. AI enables the speech of both the call centre operator and the customer to be converted into text files and then an algorithm scans that text looking for keywords that may indicate an area of risk for the enterprise or sentiment analysis of the customer. "All AI today is narrow-focused, in other words, we have a system and we give it a specific challenge or task, a series of input data and a whole bunch of training data which is usually labelled or pre-classified," said Charles Sevior, CTO Unstructured Data Solutions, APJ and Greater China, Dell EMC, in an email interview with Networks Asia. "We are at the early stages of having computers accurately interpret unstructured data in a time so fast that it is considered to be "just like a human" – so-called AI."

Let us build a crude decision tree which predicts the outcome in probabilities (In Scikit learn, predict method returns the predicted classes while the predict_proba method returns the predicted probabilities. What do you think would be most simple and easy way to predict the probabilities? I have touched it up a little bit. The fit method accepts a dataframe(data) and a string for the target attribute(target). Both of the them are then assigned to the object.

On this episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Kara sits downs with Sunil Paul, the co-founder of Sidecar who recently penned a popular post for this site, "The scooter wars will be a bloodbath, and Uber will win." In this podcast, he elaborates on why that is and shares his thoughts about the broader transportation industry, including self-driving cars, bike-sharing and vertical lift and take-off vehicles like Larry Page's Kitty Hawk "flying car." Now primarily an investor, Paul also talks about why Sidecar couldn't compete with Uber and Lyft -- even though it created ride-hailing features that are now popular parts of their products. 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 Paul. Sunil Paul: Great to be here. Let's do a little background. You and I have known each other for ... A dog's age, as they say, like since D.C., in the early 90s. Can you explain how you were lucky enough to meet me then? Well, I think I first met you when I was AOL's internet product manager. And then, I started a company. I think you were the demo boy. That's what I think you were, weren't you? You showed me some demos. I think I was a demo boy. I recall demo boy-ing for Steve Case. You were working at AOL. What products did you work on there? How did you get there? What were you doing in D.C.? I came to D.C. to work on a space station. My early career I was an engineer. I helped do the early design for a space station. Then I got really interested in policy because Congress kept mucking around with the space station. I went, spent several years as a policy analyst on the Hill for [the] Office of Technology Assessment. While I was there, I started mucking around with this new thing, that was the early '90s, I started mucking around with this new thing called the internet and that ... Why did you pick AOL?

On this episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Kara sits downs with Sunil Paul, the co-founder of Sidecar who recently penned a popular post for this site, "The scooter wars will be a bloodbath, and Uber will win." In this podcast, he elaborates on why that is and shares his thoughts about the broader transportation industry, including self-driving cars, bike-sharing and vertical lift and take-off vehicles like Larry Page's Kitty Hawk "flying car." Now primarily an investor, Paul also talks about why Sidecar couldn't compete with Uber and Lyft -- even though it created ride-hailing features that are now popular parts of their products. 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 Paul. Sunil Paul: Great to be here. Let's do a little background. You and I have known each other for ... A dog's age, as they say, like since D.C., in the early 90s. Can you explain how you were lucky enough to meet me then? Well, I think I first met you when I was AOL's internet product manager. And then, I started a company. I think you were the demo boy. That's what I think you were, weren't you? You showed me some demos. I think I was a demo boy. I recall demo boy-ing for Steve Case. You were working at AOL. What products did you work on there? How did you get there? What were you doing in D.C.? I came to D.C. to work on a space station. My early career I was an engineer. I helped do the early design for a space station. Then I got really interested in policy because Congress kept mucking around with the space station. I went, spent several years as a policy analyst on the Hill for [the] Office of Technology Assessment. While I was there, I started mucking around with this new thing, that was the early '90s, I started mucking around with this new thing called the internet and that ... Why did you pick AOL?

Everyone talks about how bad customer service is at the same time that businesses have spent millions on trying to improve it, yet it feels like nothing really changes. Today the experts are moving from the general customer service approach to focusing on the customer experience. What does that mean for your business? First you need to understand that the customer experience is the all encompassing support you offer your customers before, during and after they buy and use your products and services--that helps them have an easy and enjoyable experience with your business. To help you understand the changes that are happening out in the field, I interviewed the leading expert on customer service, Sophia Brooks, president and CEO, Global Learning Partners, Inc. Today I share with you my interview with Sophia Brooks where she answers the question; what is good customer service and how can we implement an effective program.

Someday, Boris Sofman wants families to sit down and debate: cat, dog or robot? Sofman is the chief executive and founder of Anki, a robotics company that's made its mark in the toy world since launching its first product in 2013, a set of smart racing cars. It followed that product's success with a toy robot called Cozmo in 2016, which the company says is the best-selling toy on Amazon in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. A new product, Vector, launched Tuesday on Kickstarter and offers the first hint of Anki's broader consumer robotics ambitions. "Our north star . . . is to have a robot in every home," Sofman said in an interview with The Washington Post.