Gina Rodriguez as Jane and Brett Dier as Michael in the popular TV series Jane the Virgin, in which a shared online calendar was a plot point. Gina Rodriguez as Jane and Brett Dier as Michael in the popular TV series Jane the Virgin, in which a shared online calendar was a plot point. People in love have always savored their relationship milestones: the first date, the first I-love-you's, meeting each other's families. Modern relationships come with their own special milestones, like swapping Wi-Fi passwords, becoming Facebook official, taking down your online dating profiles, and increasingly often, choosing to share your online calendar. These days, more couples are discussing whether to make their online calendars visible to each other.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Science fiction authors love the robot sidekick. R2-D2, Commander Data, and KITT--just to name a few--defined "Star Wars," "Star Trek," and "Knight Rider," respectively, just as much as their human actors. While science has brought us many of the inventions dreamed of in sci-fi shows, one major human activity has remained low tech and a huge source of frustration: household chores.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly automated* Automaton bloggers. We'll be also 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. Mark your calendars: the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots" is in less than two weeks! Loyal readers of this blog will probably recognize all of the robots and most of the people in the trailer, but it looks like NOVA--which bills itself as "the most-watched primetime science series on television"--scored some great expert commentary along with footage of DRC robots that we've never seen before.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your stigmergic Automaton bloggers. We're also 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. "Academy Award -nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of 30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers." "DARPA's Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to provide innovative cross-pollination between fixed-wing and rotary-wing technologies and by developing and integrating novel subsystems to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruising flight capabilities.

Editors Note: This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here. Once upon a time there was a very odd British television show called The Prisoner, which featured a secret agent repeatedly attempting to escape from a mysterious village. One of the biggest threats the agent faced was a giant balloon called Rover, which would pursue and subdue rule-breaking villagers. Now Rover has been brought to reality, albeit in a much more adorable version, thanks to the engineers at Aerotain and their Skye inflatable drone.

Software that turns eye movement into musical notes lets you compose music or play a tune on a virtual instrument with just your eyes. Called Eye Conductor, it was developed by Andreas Refsgaard at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark and his colleagues to provide a musical outlet for people with physical disabilities. Caring for a boy with muscular dystrophy, Refsgaard found that it was hard to help him express himself creatively. "I wanted to create a solution that still requires practice, like a traditional instrument," he says. The system uses an off-the-shelf eye tracker with a webcam to follow a person's gaze.

From our every day perspective, the insects and spiders that surround us usually appear to encased inside smooth and shiny exoskeletons. But a new selection of macro-images reveal that if we were to meet these miniature beasts at their own level, we would discover their bodies are actually covered in thick fur, fur like bristles and scales that look almost like feathers. The world of the small has been brought into focus in stunning detail thanks to a series of macro photographs from an amateur wildlife photographer, which reveals the creatures as very different from how we normally see them. The incredible series of images show insects and arachnids in stunning detail. Captured by Russian software architect Vasily Menshov, the series reveals the hairy antennae of mosquitoes, the feather like scales of butterflies and the alien-like appearance of hoverflies.

It is one of the biggest sites in the world with over a billion users, but YouTube began life as a dating site, one its co-founders has revealed. Steve Chen, speaking at the South by Southwest in Austin to launch his news food video site Nom, said it was conceived on Valentine's day - but five days later, had not attracted a single user. 'We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?' he said. 'We thought dating would be the obvious choice.' YouTube founders Steve Chen (left) and Chad Hurley: Speaking at the South by Southwest in Austin to launch his news food video site Nom, Chen said it was conceived on Valentine's day - but five days later, had not attracted a single user.

Apple's brand may be one of the most recognisable and coveted in the world, but co-founder Steve Wozniak has hinted the firm is largely unrecognisable to the'world changing' one he helped build. Wozniak puts this down to the advent of the Apple Watch, which he claims is too complex and has taken the firm into the jewellery market. During an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, the 65-year-old said the'only difference is the band in all those watches.' Steve Wozniak (pictured) criticised the complexity and non world changing nature of the Apple Watch line, but lavished praise on the firm's CEO, Steve Cook and its rumoured plans to make a self-driving car But the computer scientist did lavish praise on Apple's boss, Tim Cook in the same interview and has high hopes for its rumoured self-driving car. Answering questions on Reddit, Wozniak wrote: 'I love my Apple Watch, but it's taken us [Apple] into a jewellery market where you're going to buy a watch between 500 or 1100 based on how important you think you are as a person.

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game. While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them. Socher, now CEO of machine learning developer MetaMind, did not intend his remarks to be construed as a comparison of Watson to the academic model he and his colleagues built. As an illustration of the new technical and cultural landscape around NLP, however, the laughter Socher's comment drew was an acknowledgment that basic and applied research in language processing is no longer the exclusive province of those with either deep pockets or strictly academic intentions. Indeed, new tools and new techniques--particularly open source technologies such as Google's word2vec neural text processing tool--combined with steady increases in computing power, have broadened the potential for natural language processing far beyond the research lab or supercomputer.