The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition consisted of four scenarios, inspired by the nuclear accident of Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and designed specifically for multi-domain human-robot teams. The first scenario is The Grand Challenge made up of three domains – sea, air, land, and the other three scenarios are made of only two domains. The Awards, given for each scenario to the best performing teams, were introduced by Alan Winfield from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency Coordinator. "The energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation among the teams competing in ERL Emergency was amazing. We witnessed not only great performances from the teams and their robots, but also the drama and excitement of last minute field repairs and workarounds to the robots", said Alan Winfield.

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees' special awards. "Behind a multi-domain competition there is always a large technical committee, I feel privileged to have worked with such an amazing team of volunteer referees, technical assistants and safety pilots and divers. We were delighted to give these awards to recognise teams' effort, fair play and hard work. The experience of participating in this robotics competition will prove beneficial for team members to develop further their professional career", said Marta Palau Franco.

We asked Jim Stroud, Global Head of Sourcing and Recruiting Strategy for the Randstad Sourceright Talent Innovation Center. "A phone screen is generally perceived as an effort to gauge the qualifications and interest of a candidate. However, I see it as more than that, especially when representing a client. A phone screen is an opportunity to make an indelible mark on someone we might hire, someone who might refer a candidate, someone who might consume the products or services of our client and someone who may rave about the recruitment experience so much that their testimonial on social media serves as a recruiting vehicle in and of itself." Additionally, in a recent blog post titled The Best Phone Screen Interview Questions, Robert Half similarly highlights the importance of phone screens saying, "a candidate's answers to key phone screening interview questions can allow you to speedily identify the most promising candidates."

We will now take a closer look at each. There are other promises of deep learning for natural language processing; these were just the 5 that I chose to highlight. What do you think the promise of deep learning is for natural language processing? Let me know in the comments below. The first promise for deep learning in natural language processing is the ability to replace existing linear models with better performing models capable of learning and exploiting nonlinear relationships. Yoav Goldberg, in his primer on neural networks for NLP researchers, highlights both that deep learning methods are achieving impressive results. More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual natural language signals, again with very promising results.

Thirty-three years later, all three of them are back for more in a sequel that Cameron has said will take place directly afterTerminator 2: Judgement Day, skipping all the sequels that have come out since then. The untitled sequel, with Deadpool's Tim Miller as director, is part of a planned trilogy and a July 26th, 2019 release. According to an interview with Cameron and Miller over at The Hollywood Reporter, the team hopes to bring the Terminator series back to its roots, with a modern sensibility based on our collective anxiety around artificial intelligence. "What was science fiction in the '80s is now imminent," Cameron told THR. "It's coming over the horizon at us... The first two Terminator films that I did dealt with the angst around that and how we reconcile it for ourselves in a fantasy context. So I got excited about the idea of finding a story that made sense for now."

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity--the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change. When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Mark Harris is a freelance journalist reporting on technology from Seattle. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation. However, documents filed with California show that Levandowski is Way of the Future's CEO and President, and that it aims "through understanding and worship of the Godhead, [to] contribute to the betterment of society." A divine AI may still be far off, but Levandowski has made a start at providing AI with an earthly incarnation. The autonomous cars he was instrumental in developing at Google are already ferrying real passengers around Phoenix, Arizona, while self-driving trucks he built at Otto are now part of Uber's plan to make freight transport safer and more efficient. He even oversaw a passenger-carrying drones project that evolved into Larry Page's Kitty Hawk startup. Levandowski has done perhaps more than anyone else to propel transportation toward its own Singularity, a time when automated cars, trucks and aircraft either free us from the danger and drudgery of human operation--or decimate mass transit, encourage urban sprawl, and enable deadly bugs and hacks. But before any of that can happen, Levandowski must face his own day of reckoning.

Aging gets a bad rap. But disease, decline and discomfort is far from the whole story. Dilip Jeste, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at UC San Diego and director of the UCSD Center for Healthy Aging, is challenging us to take another look. In conversation with Nautilus, Jeste points out that some things get better with age, like the ability to make decisions, control emotions, and have compassion for others--in other words, we get wiser with age. The challenge to aging well, he argues, is to be optimist, resilient and pro-active, allowing the benefits of age to shine through.

Today, we'll be following up on our recent post on the Google Cloud Natural Language API. In this post, we're going to take a second look at the service and compare it to the Stanford CoreNLP, a well-known suite for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We will walk you through how to get started using the Stanford CoreNLP, and then we'll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two solutions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the hottest topics in IT. The major cloud platforms--Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure--are increasingly exposing a variety of these functions in a way that makes it easy for developers to integrate them into their apps.

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity--the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change. When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Mark Harris is a freelance journalist reporting on technology from Seattle. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation. However, documents filed with California show that Levandowski is Way of the Future's CEO and President, and that it aims "through understanding and worship of the Godhead, [to] contribute to the betterment of society." A divine AI may still be far off, but Levandowski has made a start at providing AI with an earthly incarnation. The autonomous cars he was instrumental in developing at Google are already ferrying real passengers around Phoenix, Arizona, while self-driving trucks he built at Otto are now part of Uber's plan to make freight transport safer and more efficient. He even oversaw a passenger-carrying drones project that evolved into Larry Page's Kitty Hawk startup. Levandowski has done perhaps more than anyone else to propel transportation toward its own Singularity, a time when automated cars, trucks and aircraft either free us from the danger and drudgery of human operation--or decimate mass transit, encourage urban sprawl, and enable deadly bugs and hacks. But before any of that can happen, Levandowski must face his own day of reckoning.

Identify the traits of your top performing employees and hire people like them, but without the discrimanatory bias of traditional recruiting. That's the promise of Pymetrics, an artificial intelligence startup that today announced $8 million in new funding onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Pymetrics' goal is "making the world a fairer place" by dismantling hiring discrimination like sexism, racism, ageism and classism. Anyone can play the Pymetrics test games and get scored on different hireable traits, plus see suggestions for job types they'd be great at. You can watch my interview with Pymetrics' CEO Frida Polli below: A company's all-star employees play Pymetrics' set of games that assess things like memory, emotion detection, risk-taking, fairness and focus.