In The News This Week is a page intended to keep my readers up to speed with anything new that I pickup online or offline that has to do with the robotic world that we are now entering very rapidly. Other pages of this website reviews a number robots that we are using on a daily basis in order to help make our lives easier, or as hobby, sport, or for professional purposes. If you would like to share your experience with any kind of robots you are using, or simply comment or ask questions, please feel free to do so at the bottom of any page or article. My latest article of "In The News This Week" starts from here. A house of 95 m2 / 1,022 sq ft has already been built thanks to this new technique. On the slab of freshly poured concrete, a robot moves on its wheels and makes work tirelessly with his articulated arm. He draws expansive foam cords one above the other to form a shuttering in which he then pour the concrete. This is how he manages to build perfectly insulated walls on each side at a bewildering speed. "It's been an hour and a half since the work began and the walls are already over 80 cm / 31 in. It is not a prototype, he pointed out, but a place that is meant to be useful. The 95 m2 / 1,022 sq ft house was finished by the end of that week and ready for the coming Christmas once the finishing work was completed. After being opened to the public, this T 5 will then be inhabited, a year later, by "traditional" tenants on the Nantes Métropole Habitat waiting list. "This house, which is already certified, says Benoit Furet, teacher-researcher at the University of Nantes at the heart of this project is called Yhnova.

Netflix has released hundreds of Originals and plans to spend $8 billion over the next year on content. Creators of these stories pour their hearts and souls into turning ideas into joy for our viewers. The sublime art of doing this well is hard to describe, but it necessitates a careful orchestration of creative, business and technical decisions. Here we will focus on the latter two -- business & technical decisions like planning budgets, finding locations, building sets, and scheduling guest actors that enable the creative act of connecting with viewers. Each production is a mountain of operational and logistical challenges that consumes and produces tremendous amounts of data.

It could be said that we humans have a strange, even somewhat strained, relationship with our technology. Even deep thought poster children like Plato fretted that a newfangled medium called "writing" would cause the end of intelligent debate. Today, of course, being literate is simply table stakes, with an estimated 86 percent of the world's population able to read and write. No doubt we could find a troll or two to advise (in writing) that literacy is the cause of society's ills, but overall, I'd say the introduction of that particular technology seems to have worked out alright in the end. This overarching question of whether technology will save or destroy us now includes many innovations that we now take for granted.

Hype over artificial intelligence reached its zenith in 2017, with CIOs, consultants and academics touting the technology as potentially automating anything from business and IT operations to customer connections. Yet through the first calendar quarter of 2018 several media organizations reported on the dangers of AI, which involves training computers to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. "There's been so much hype in the media about it and this is just journalists trying to extend the hype by talking about the negative side," says Thomas Davenport, a Babson College distinguished professor who teaches a class on cognitive technologies. Perhaps, but the concerns are hardly new and very persistent, ranging from fears about racial, gender and other biases to automated drones running amok with potentially lethal consequences. Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter.

Elon Musk tweeted a link to a new documentary movie " Do You Trust This Computer?" I was able to watch it within the free-viewing window and was impressed by the production values, script, and range of featured experts (inlcuding, of course, Musk). One quote by Dr. Brian Herman, an endovascular neurosurgeon and chair of interventional neuroradiology at Eisenhower Medical Center echoed a statement I made during a recent conversation with a physician friend: "It seems that we are feeding it and creating it. But in a way we are a slave to the technology: Because we can't go back." Coinicidentally, while attending an event at the Salk Institute here in San Diego today, someone said pretty much the same thing to me regarding traditional versus digital-enabled modern drug development: "we can't go back."

Understanding and predicting the popularity of online items is an important open problem in social media analysis. Considerable progress has been made recently in data-driven predictions, and in linking popularity to external promotions. However, the existing methods typically focus on a single source of external influence, whereas for many types of online content such as YouTube videos or news articles, attention is driven by multiple heterogeneous sources simultaneously - e.g. microblogs or traditional media coverage. Here, we propose RNN-MAS, a recurrent neural network for modeling asynchronous streams. It is a sequence generator that connects multiple streams of different granularity via joint inference. We show RNN-MAS not only to outperform the current state-of-the-art Youtube popularity prediction system by 17%, but also to capture complex dynamics, such as seasonal trends of unseen influence. We define two new metrics: promotion score quantifies the gain in popularity from one unit of promotion for a Youtube video; the loudness level captures the effects of a particular user tweeting about the video. We use the loudness level to compare the effects of a video being promoted by a single highly-followed user (in the top 1% most followed users) against being promoted by a group of mid-followed users. We find that results depend on the type of content being promoted: superusers are more successful in promoting Howto and Gaming videos, whereas the cohort of regular users are more influential for Activism videos. This work provides more accurate and explainable popularity predictions, as well as computational tools for content producers and marketers to allocate resources for promotion campaigns.

This is a technical deep dive of the collaborative filtering algorithm and how to use it in practice. From Amazon recommending products you may be interested in based on your recent purchases to Netflix recommending shows and movies you may want to watch, recommender systems have become popular across many applications of data science. Like many other problems in data science, there are several ways to approach recommendations. Two of the most popular are collaborative filtering and content-based recommendations. Content-based Recommendations: If companies have detailed metadata about each of your items, they can recommend items with similar metadata tags.

A computer scientist featured in a new documentary is claiming that sex robots could forever change humanity by making sex too accessible. The documentary is called'Sex Robots and Us', and in it Noel Sharkey warns of the damage these robots, which are growing in popularity, can do to society. In the film Sharkey cautions that the machines could make sex'too easy' and'change humanity completely'. Computer scientist Noel Sharkey has expressed concern over the negative consequences of sex robots in a new documentary called'Sex Robots and Us'. He claims that the technology will make sex easier to obtain and permanently change society.

As recent efforts – Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, Warcraft – continue to show, video games rarely make great movies. Dwayne Johnson's new epic Rampage might change all this, just as giant, genetically modified wolves might fly, but the source material was hardly that compelling to start with, partly because it was already a mish-mash of movie tropes. In the original Rampage arcade game, you could be King Kong, Godzilla or a werewolf and you basically had to re-enact a city-trashing scene out of a monster movie. Now, see the movie of the game of the movie! To turn it around, however, games already have taken over the movies.

The virtual personal assistant is romanticized in utopian portrayals of the future from The Jetsons to Star Trek. It's the cultured, disembodied voice at humanity's beck and call, eager and willing to do any number of menial tasks. In its early real-world implementations, a virtual receptionist directed customers ('To hear more menu options, press 9'). It wasn't until 2011 that Apple released Siri and the public had its first interactions with a commercially viable, dynamic personal assistant. Since Siri's debut with the release of the iPhone 4S, Apple's massive customer base has only gotten larger; the company estimates that more than 700 million iPhones are currently in use worldwide. Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana debuted in 2014; Google Assistant followed in 2016. IT research firm Gartner predicts that many touch-required tasks on mobile apps will become voice activated within the next several years.