Robotics has come a long way in the past few years. Robots can now fetch items from specific spots in massive warehouses, swim through the ocean to study marine life, and lift 200 times their own weight. They can even perform synchronized dance routines. But the really big question is--can robots put together an Ikea chair? A team of engineers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore decided to find out, detailing their work in a paper published last week in the journal Science Robotics.

Until now, being able to extract value from large volumes of unstructured or semi-structured content has been hard and required a machine learning (ML) background. Amazon Comprehend removes those barriers to entry and enables data engineers and developers easy access to rich, continuously trained, natural language processing services. You can build a complete analytics solution by joining analysis from Amazon Comprehend with relational business information to build valuable trend analysis. For example, you can understand what competitive products are most often mentioned in articles discussing your brand, product, or service. Customers can also join the sentiment of their customer feedback with customer profile information to better understand what types of customers react a specific way when you launch a new product.

Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail and cloud computing giant has embarked on an ambitious, top-secret plan to build a domestic robot, according to people familiar with the plans. Codenamed "Vesta," after the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, the project is overseen by Gregg Zehr, who runs Amazon's Lab126 hardware research and development division based in Sunnyvale, California.

Amazon is often compared to Silicon Valley tech giants like Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, but a vast logistical apparatus separates it from its tech peers. They unload trucks, drive forklifts and walk miles collecting products to fill orders--all for around the same pay as workers in other companies' warehouses. One researcher likened Amazon to the child produced by a three-way merger between Google, United Parcel Service Inc. and Walmart Inc. "At Amazon, you've got this whole group of foot soldiers out there that are working on fulfillment centers that aren't part of the picture for the other names in internet land," said Michael Olson, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. "It shows how Amazon is different from the other tech stocks." More than 330 large public companies have disclosed median annual pay figures for the first time this year, a requirement of the post-financial crisis Dodd-Frank law.

Agriculture companies are always striving to produce better tasting, longer lasting fruits and vegetables. Whether it's corn or berries, produce diminishes in value the minute it goes from the stalk or vine to the market. Driscoll's, a $3.5 billion provider of berry plants, is turning to emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain, to produce hardier plants and fortify its supply chain. "We're just scratching the surface on building an integrated data platform strategy that will take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning, both for R&D genetics and on the value chain of fruits as well as business operations," Driscoll's CIO Tom Cullen tells CIO.com. Driscoll's develops and leases strains of berry nursery plants -- strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries -- to growers around the world, from the Americas to New Zealand, China and Australia.

In recent years, a handful of others have set out to teach robots to assemble Ikea furniture, a task that can mimic the manipulations robots can or may someday perform on factory floors and that involves a brand many know all too well. "It's something that almost everybody is familiar with and almost everybody hates doing," said Ross A. Knepper, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction. In 2013, Mr. Knepper was part of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that presented a paper on its work in the area, describing the "IkeaBot" the team created, which could assemble the company's Lack table on its own. But chairs, with backs, stretchers and other parts, pose a more complex challenge; hence the interest of the Nanyang researchers. Their robot was made of custom software, a three-dimensional camera, two robotic arms, grippers and force detectors.

Today retailers are faced with a constant storm of challenges from battling consumer price sensitivity and digital competitors to in- story showrooming and customer complaints about service. As the retail landscape grows complex, chatbots are offered a prime opportunity to improve both customer experience and giving retailers a fighting chance. Despite this opportunity, the chatbot market forecasts naturally give a much smaller share to shopping's brick and mortar cousin of the e-commerce darling. Most of the attention we've seen so far has been on messenger bots for ecommerce experiences. But let's look at the role bots can play and are already playing in brick and mortar stores.

After years of failed attempts, a research team in Singapore has successfully taught a pair of robots to do something that many humans still can't: build an IKEA chair. The wooden Stefan chair is not the world's first piece of AI-assembled flatpack furniture: Robots at MIT built a simple Lack table in 2013. A chair is more complicated. And while a robot can be programmed to do a single assembly-line task efficiently, mastering all of the small tasks that IKEA assembly requires is a bigger challenge. Some of the same things humans struggle with, like fiddling with bags of screws, dowels, and doodads while trying to distinguish the slight variations in shape, are also difficult for robots.

We trust you've had a suitably enjoyable week, especially those in the UK enjoying the hot weather. Let's journey back and look at some of the digital marketing stats you might have missed. The roundup includes news about GDPR, personalisation, AI, and lots more. As always, be sure to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium for further facts and figures. When it comes to digital experiences, personalisation is way down on the list of things consumers care about.

Artificial intelligence has mastered something that humankind has failed at, repeatedly. An autonomous robot, designed by mechanical engineers in Singapore, can now assemble an IKEA chair from scratch without a manual in less than 21 minutes. Such a feat has been described as the "equivalent of the moon landings for robotics" because the skills required are straightforward but immensely complex. And it illustrates the tremendous distance that automated systems robots have traveled in a short period time. The study was published Wednesday in Science Robotics.