Mike Salem from Udacity's Robotics Nanodegree is hosting a series of interviews with professional roboticists as part of their free online material. Jillian is a video game designer turned roboticist attempting to combine games in robotics in a unique user experience. You can find all the interviews here. We'll be posting them regularly on Robohub.

After Kubiiki Pride's 13-year-old daughter disappeared, it took 270 days for her mother to find her. When she did, it was as an escort available to be rented out on an online classified web site. Her daughter had been drugged and beaten into compliance by a sex trafficker. To find her, Pride had to trawl through hundreds of advertisements on Backpage.com, When it comes to identifying signs of human trafficking in online sex adverts, the task for police is often no easier.

Data science and machine learning are some of the top buzzwords in the technical world today. Machine learning is the buzzword bringing computer science and statistics together to build smart and efficient models. Using powerful algorithms and techniques offered by machine learning you can automate any analytical model. Python is one of the most popular languages used for machine learning and arguably, the best entry point to the fascinating world of machine learning (ML). If you're interested to explore both the programming and machine learning world with python, then go for this course.

Sri Saripalli and Swami Gopalswamy of the department of mechanical engineering have been stationed outside Kyle Field all week with several engineering students and the vehicle, which features a laser sensor, exterior cameras and speakers and a LED computer monitor propped over the steering wheel. This vehicle is the brain child of Saripalli, Gopalswamy and four graduate and undergraduate students, assisted by engineers at Virginia Tech University. It is designed to transport students from one point to another on the sidewalks and minor roadways of a campus, following a pre-drawn GPS path on continuous loop.

R is considered as lingua franca of Data Science. Candidates with expertise in R programming language are in exceedingly high demand and paid lucratively in Data Science. IEEE has repeatedly ranked R as one of the top and most popular Programming Languages. Almost every Data Science and Machine Learning job posted globally mentions the requirement for R language proficiency. All the top ranked universities like MIT have included R in their respective Data Science courses curriculum.

What does the future of work look like? Will there still be jobs even if the nature of work is exceptionally different from today? New technologies undoubtedly changed the way we work. Recent studies suggest that unemployment rate today is significant in most developed nations and it's only going to get worse. By 2030, mid-level jobs will be by and large obsolete.

When Amazon first coined the strapline "Ask Alexa" for its virtual assistant, it couldn't have predicted the X-rated nature of some of the requests. "She" may boast an encyclopaedic knowledge, but research by consumer behaviour analysts Canvas8 reveals that some users are more interested in a virtual hook-up than fact finding. And she's not the only target: the equally smooth voice of Microsoft's Cortana is getting customers just as hot under the collar apparently. From perma-smiling avatars in traditionally female support roles, to hyper-sexualised "fembots" pandering to male fantasies, the female form is everywhere in techno-world - attractive, servile and at your command. A little more conservative, but just as eager to please, is virtual personal assistant Amy Ingram, the brainchild of New York start-up X.ai.

Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. It explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners to develop statistical software and data analysis. In this course, you will work through various examples on advanced algorithms, and focus a bit more on some visualization options. We'll start by showing you how to use random forest to predict what type of insurance a patient has based on their treatment and you will get an overview of how to use random forest/decision tree and examine the model.

Eran Kahana, an intellectual-property lawyer at Maslon LLP and a fellow at Stanford Law School, doesn't believe we should award authorship to AIs. He explains that the reason IP laws exist is to "prevent others from using it and enabling the owner to generate a benefit. An AI doesn't have any of those needs. AI is a tool to generate those kinds of content." "Obviously not the computer", Kahana quips.

The field of artificial intelligence has made great strides recently, as in AlphaGo's victories in the game of Go over world champion South Korean Lee Sedol in March 2016 and top-ranked Chinese Go player Ke Jie in May 2017, leading to great optimism for the field. But are we really moving toward smarter machines, or are these successes restricted to certain classes of problems, leaving others untouched? In 2015, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) ran its first Allen AI Science Challenge, a competition to test machines on an ostensibly difficult task--answering eighth-grade science questions. Our motivations were to encourage the field to set its sights more broadly by exploring a problem that appears to require modeling, reasoning, language understanding, and commonsense knowledge in order to probe the state of the art while sowing the seeds for possible future breakthroughs. Challenge problems have historically played an important role in motivating and driving progress in research.