Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Intuition Robotics, a startup pioneering social companion technologies, today emerged from stealth debuting Elli•Q, an artificial intelligence-based robot companion that keeps older adults active and engaged. Elli•Q, whose design intentionally avoids the look and feel of a traditional robot, seamlessly enables older adults to use a vast array of technologies, including video chats, online games and social media to connect with families and friends and overcome the complexity of the digital world.

As of last month Alphabet Inc.'s AI division, Google DeepMind, has open-sourced their new machine learning platform DeepMind Lab. Artificial Intelligence is the technology of the moment, constantly debated and attracting massive attention from investors. Despite warnings from influential figures including Professor Stephen Hawking, Google's decision to open up their software to other developers is part of a mass movement to advance the capabilities of AI. Facebook open sourced its own deep learning software last year, and Elon Musk's non-profit organisation OpenAI recently released Universe, an open software platform that can be used to train AI systems. So, why have Google, OpenAI and others made these platforms public, and how will this affect the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning as a whole?

Use of technology is not new to education sector. Over the years, there has been concerted effort of government and EdTech firms to promote information communication technology (ICT) in schools, and colleges in India. Though the technology intervention in the form of smart classes or self-learning tools have made progress but the advancement in the technology itself like emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality are yet to take noticeable inroads into the schools and colleges in the country. However, with the proliferation of EduTech firms and traditional publishing houses like MBD focusing on these technology, possibility of big breakthroughs is quite high. Here are couple of breakthroughs technology that companies like Next Education says can change the EdTech in 2017.

On December 6 and 7, academics, medical professionals, even professional humorists, among others shared their expertise and vision for how technology is changing the world, and how we live in that world, at the Future Today Summit. Founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute Amy Webb, who is an adjunct professor on futures forecasting at the New York University Stern School of Business, spoke to IBM (a sponsor of the Future Today Summit) about what it means to be a futurist, how futurists predicted fake news, and skills we all need in the future. When and why did you decide to call yourself a futurist? Amy Webb: Fifteen years ago, I was a journalist based in Tokyo, reporting and writing about the future of technology, the economy and digital culture. I'd had grown restless, though – my reporting was inherently a reflection on the past.

Within the last 10 years, there has been a rapid growth of new jobs and industries that have never existed, and jobs that are going by the wayside due to technology. The advancement in technology has transformed our way of life in how we communicate, do business, work, travel, buy, sell, bank, in transportation, and in our careers. Technology has touched almost every area of our lives and it will be what transforms our education system. Technology is driving these rapid changes in our society, however the education system has not felt the full effects of how technology will transform the system that has been in place for decades. The system is worried more about test scores and how these test scores reflect a school, a district, a city, and the state.

This isn't the AI that pop culture has conditioned us to expect; it's not sentient robots or Skynet or even Tony Stark's Jarvis assistant. This AI plateau is happening under the surface, making our existing technology smarter and unlocking the power of all the data that enterprises collect. What that means: Widespread advancement in machine learning (ML), computer vision, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) have made it easier than ever to bake an AI algorithm layer into your software or cloud platform. For businesses, practical AI applications can manifest in all sorts of ways, depending on your organizational needs and the business intelligence (BI) insights derived from the data you collect. Enterprises can employ AI for everything from mining social data to driving engagement in customer relationship management (CRM) to optimizing logistics and efficiency when it comes to tracking and managing assets.

Here is our new selection of featured articles and resources posted since Monday.

How do you combine historical Big Data with machine learning for real-time analytics? An approach is outlined with different software vendors, business use cases, and best practices. "Big Data" has gained a lot of momentum recently. Vast amounts of operational data are collected and stored in Hadoop and other platforms on which historical analysis is conducted. Business intelligence tools and distributed statistical computing are used to find new patterns in this data and gain new insights and knowledge for a variety of use cases: promotions, up- and cross-sell campaigns, improved customer experience, or fraud detection.

Current take: Statistics, not machine learning, is the real deal, but unfortunately suffers from bad marketing. On the other hand, to the extent that bad marketing includes misguided undergraduate curriculums, there's plenty of room to improve for everyone. I had two thoughts reading this. Machine learners invent annoying new terms, sound cooler, and have all the fun. They have way less funding and influence than it seems they might deserve.

What don't you know that you need to know, and how do you know you don't know? Imagine putting that into a search engine, expecting a coherent answer. The answers we seek are at the core of discovery and learning, motivated by necessity and pleasure, by job displacement, or leadership uncertainty in a complex and fast changing world. The process of learning requires a detailed knowledge of ourselves and of our world, whether a human or a machine is tasked to help. We can fill gaps in our skills and knowledge through web searches, discussion with experts and like-minded people, reading books, working through an education curriculum, learning online with video tutorials, and absorbing a vast amount of content flowing through online news channels and aggregators.