Last May, my wife and baby and I moved from Austin to Dallas, into an actual house in an actual neighborhood on the east side of the city. We had a few weeks to set up before my wife was going to leave for about three months for job training. Aside from my child and wife, I knew no one in town. We spent a week filling our lives with the things we thought were supposed to go in houses: a sleek water heater that hummed like a cyclotron, new fuses, and a noise machine for our son. We learned about our surroundings, too.

Most robots are designed to do work. As such, not a lot of time, effort, or money is spent on making them able to communicate with humans, because they're usually just doing their own thing. This is starting to change a bit, though, as robots become versatile enough that it's reasonable to have humans working with them more directly, and it's becoming more important that those humans have some idea what the robot is up to. Some robots manage this with sounds, or lights, or screens with faces on them, but there are many systems for which hardware modifications like that aren't a good option. In one of best papers from all of HRI 2018 (seriously, they won a best paper award), roboticists from the University of Colorado Boulder explore how using augmented reality to help robots communicate with humans can make the bots feel safer, more efficient, and more part of a collaborative team.

Mark Zuckerberg has defended the rights of holocaust deniers to stay on Facebook – because they are being genuine. The Facebook boss said that he found the belief that the holocaust did not happen was deeply offensive. But he said that the people using his site to promote should be allowed to use it and that the posts should stay up. There are many things that people get wrong and those that claim that the holocaust did not happen are one of them, he suggested during an interview. He claimed that since the people are mistaken in their belief, rather than intending to harm anyone, they will continue to be allowed to post on the site.

Recently, a lot of people started asking me about what machine learning is all about. Today I am writing one of the my most irritating chats I had with my sister Parry about Machine Learning. Parry is 8 years experienced in Informatica and I have 4 years of Industry Experience. Parry: So what are you upto these days? Parry: Well, that's the buzz word everyone is talking about.

In the early 2000s, game publisher Bethesda was best known for its Elder Scrolls series of technologically ambitious fantasy games. In the last 15 years, however, it has expanded greatly, snapping up several legendary video game franchises as well as starting an original series of its own. The company now produces the Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing games; the iconic, hellish shooter Doom; tongue-in-cheek Nazi-killing romp Wolfenstein; supernatural steampunk assassin sim Dishonoured; and Rage, a Mad Max-style romp around a devastated world. At its E3 press conference last month, after showing new Doom, Rage, Fallout and Wolfenstein titles, Bethesda teased the next entry in its Elder Scrolls series as well as a new sci-fi role-playing game called Starfield. For both, 100 hours is a conservative playtime estimate.

LONDON, UK: Following the awards ceremony, heldat the Insurance AI and Analytics USA Summit, Chicago, the three winners of the Insurance Nexus AI Pioneers Awards have been announced. The awards were held to showcase and celebrate those companies and individuals who have made the most impact in insurance AI innovation over the past year, with entrants nominated, and voted for, by the industry. The volume of responses was outstanding, with 3,000 votes cast across the three categories. There were three categories of awards: Underwriting Application of the year (recognizes the most exceptional business case on underwriting over the past 12 months), Customer Experience Application (recognizes the most exceptional business case on customer experience over the past 12 months) and Claims Application (recognizes the most exceptional business case on claims over the past 12 months). 'We were thrilled with how the industry engaged with us on the AI Pioneers awards.

For a couple of days this week, I attended the EmTech NEXT conference at MIT, which is organized by MIT Technology Review. The focus of the event was that fabled idea "The Future of Work," and if you are on the side of the humans, the future seems pretty bright. Virtually every speaker (MIT folks, AI and robotics leaders) came out in favor of augmentation over automation. They say that AI and robots won't take our jobs, but rather augment them by doing the things we humans don't do so well. I must say that I was a bit surprised that augmentation has become the consensus view among experts.

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QBE North America recently announced its investment and multi-year commercial use agreement with HyperScience (New York), a machine learning, enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) solution, which the insurer intends to use drive operational efficiency and unlock new data and insights for underwriting, pricing and claims. The acquisition was the third in a series flowing from a $50 million commitment QBE announced in 2017 to invest in early-stage businesses working on technically-challenging and industry-changing ideas. The company earlier announced its investments in RiskGenius (Overland Park, Kan.), a machine learning platform for analyzing policy wordings, in Oct. 2017, and Cytora, a London-based company that uses open source data to help commercial insurers lower loss ratios, grow premiums and improve expense ratios, in Dec. 2017. David McMillan, QBE's Group COO has characterized the acquisitions as contributing to the company's objective of delivering "Brilliant Basics" in underwriting, pricing and claims. Insurance Innovation Reporter talked with Ted Stuckey, SVP, Managing Director of QBE Ventures, and Head of QBE's Global Innovation Lab, to talk about the acquisitions and how they fit into QBE's broader strategy.

Remember the movie "The Imitation Game"? The tragic story of a brilliant man who decrypted secret German Enigma messages, indirectly shortened World War II, saved millions of lives, and was later charged for homosexuality, forced to undergo chemical treatment, and ended his life shortly after? The real Alan Turing accomplished many more brilliant miracles than this. He also published papers on theories of artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, the title "The Imitation Game" had little to do with the movie. It was a game he mentioned in one of his papers where humans will one day engineer a machine to imitate humans so well that a human on the other side of the room will be fooled he was communicating with another human. Turing was a pioneer in the field of computer science. Only after his death would he be known as the father of AI.