Along with the usual highlights from this week, we have some space exploration highlights, including your first chance to hear the wind on Mars. Also, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_2045 is coming to Netflix, and you need to know about the Audi E-Tron. NASA's InSight lander picked up something that other Mars missions never have -- audio of the planet's winds. "Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator, said in a statement. "But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves."

Conventional methods for visual assessment of civil infrastructures have certain limitations, such as subjectivity of the collected data, long inspection time, and high cost of labor. Although some new technologies i.e. robotic techniques that are currently in practice can collect objective, quantified data, the inspectors own expertise is still critical in many instances since these technologies are not designed to work interactively with human inspector. This study aims to create a smart, human centered method that offers significant contributions to infrastructure inspection, maintenance, management practice, and safety for the bridge owners. By developing a smart Mixed Reality framework, which can be integrated into a wearable holographic headset device, a bridge inspector, for example, can automatically analyze a certain defect such as a crack that he or she sees on an element, display its dimension information in real-time along with the condition state. Such systems can potentially decrease the time and cost of infrastructure inspections by accelerating essential tasks of the inspector such as defect measurement, condition assessment and data processing to management systems. The human centered artificial intelligence will help the inspector collect more quantified and objective data while incorporating inspectors professional judgement. This study explains in detail the described system and related methodologies of implementing attention guided semi supervised deep learning into mixed reality technology, which interacts with the human inspector during assessment. Thereby, the inspector and the AI will collaborate or communicate for improved visual inspection.

Phan Hoang Tu Linh feels she has gotten the hang of working in a Japanese convenience store now, but she admits she found it tough at first. "We have three cash registers in our store but only two lines to wait in," says the 23-year-old Vietnamese national, who came to Japan to study at a Japanese-language school in Tokyo in July 2017 and started working part-time at a convenience store two months later. "One of the customers went before another customer who was supposed to be first, but I didn't see it because I was too busy," Phan says. "The customer got really angry and started shouting at me that they were supposed to be first. I felt really bad after that. My co-workers all told me that there was no need for the customer to get so angry and that it wasn't my fault. Sometimes people bring their stress from the workplace and take it out on us."

A SpaceX delivery full of Christmas goodies arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday following a slight delay caused by a communication drop-out. The American company's Dragon capsule pulled up at the orbiting lab three days after launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Commander Alexander Gerst used the space station's big robotic arm to grab the cargo carrier, as the two craft soared 250 miles above the Pacific. It took two tries to get the Dragon close enough for capture. NASA called off the Dragon's first approach because of trouble with the communication network that serves the space station.

Artificial intelligence is already beginning to spiral out of our control, a new report from top researchers warns. Not so much in a Skynet kind of sense, but more in a'technology companies and governments are already using AI in ways that amp up surveillance and further marginalize vulnerable populations' kind of way. On Thursday, the AI Now Institute, which is affiliated with New York University and is home to top AI researchers with Google and Microsoft, released a report detailing, essentially, the state of AI in 2018, and the raft of disconcerting trends unfolding in the field. What we broadly define as AI--machine learning, automated systems, etc.--is currently being developed faster than our regulatory system is prepared to handle, the report says. And it threatens to consolidate power in the tech companies and oppressive governments that deploy AI while rendering just about everyone else more vulnerable to its biases, capacities for surveillance, and myriad dysfunctions.

December means holiday parties, New Year's resolutions, and a blizzard of technology industry predictions. You'll see a ton of AI-related calls as we approach 2019. The artificial intelligence hype machine is already roaring. The potential impacts of AI are wide-ranging – as are the related forecasts, on everything from how AI will change college admissions to the role it will play in international relations and politics. We decided to focus on the trends that matter most urgently to IT leaders – you don't need another "AI is taking over the world" story; you need concrete insights for your team and business.

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 few 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. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst welcomed a new face to the Columbus laboratory, thanks to the successful commissioning of technology demonstration Cimon. Short for Crew Interactive Mobile CompanioN, Cimon is a 3D-printed plastic sphere designed to test human-machine interaction in space.

The president of Microsoft has called for greater government regulation of AI facial recognition technology, because of the risk of it discriminating against women and people of colour. In a rare incident of a tech giant calling for greater government scrutiny, Brad Smith said such regulation would help avoid "a commercial race to the bottom, with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success". The comments of Mr Smith, 59, which were released at the same time as a report by a research group consisting of both Microsoft and Google employees also calling for more regulation, are especially noteworthy because of the controversy the company triggered earlier this year over its AI work. In June, the company's general manager Tom Keane, wrote how proud Microsoft was to be working with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to use facial recognition technology to help identify immigrants and process applications. In a blog post about Azure Government, a programme designed to allow government agencies upload information to the computing cloud, he said: "The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we're proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud." The comments were made as the Trump administration and ICE were facing intense criticism from human rights advocates and others for the way migrant families were being broken up and separated at the US-Mexico border.

It demonstrates Beijing's growing ambitions as a space power to rival Russia, the European Union and the US. With its Chang'e 4 mission, China hopes to be the first country to make a soft landing, which is a landing of a spacecraft during which no serious damage is incurred. The moon's far side is also known as the dark side because it faces away from Earth and remains comparatively unknown. It has a different composition than sites on the near side, where previous missions have landed. If successful, the mission would propel the Chinese space program to a leading position in one of the most important areas of lunar exploration.

Andrew Yang announced he is vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination back in February. But how is he going to do that? I got the chance to sit down with him at the Work Awesome conference in New York yesterday to ask him about his stances on trucking automation, AI policy, and his favorite topic, universal basic income (UBI). This article first appeared in Clocking In, our newsletter covering the impact of emerging technology on the future of work. Erin: Why focus on automation and UBI? Andrew: The reason why I'm focused on this issue is I'm convinced it's driving the social, economic, and political dysfunction we are seeing.