It is the task that tests many of the most skilled, patient humans. But the robots appear to be catching up. A new robot has been taught to successfully put together a piece of Ikea furniture. It could one day leave the tough job of finding the right screws and putting them in the right place to the past – leaving humans never to have to struggle to put together their new chair again. Doing so takes even longer than the time required to put together flat-pack furniture: the scientists spent three years programming the robot to make sure that its arms, grippers, sensors and 3D cameras could put together the chair.

"Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century" – Harvard Business Review "Expect a shortage of over 100,000 data scientists by 2020" – Gartner Unarguably, in today's hyper-competitive marketplace, Data Science plays an indispensable role for organizations to personalize experiences and create value out of their data. Analyzing large data sets without preset defined rules or scope for analysis to uncover insights, a sublime concept till a few years ago, will form the key basis of competition in the future to significantly unlock business value, unleashing new waves of productivity for businesses, enabling a culture of innovation, and reinvigorating internal processes, as long as the right ecosystem and enablers are put in place. Numerous articles today are buzzing with this glamourous new word in the Analytics world i.e. So what exactly is Data Science or this hype around Data Scientist? Frankly speaking, multiple definitions, roles, job descriptions exist making it harder for businesses to understand what truly is the role about and the ROI out of making any additional investments.

Donald Trump has hammered Amazon.com Inc.'s share price in recent weeks by trying to pick fights online with Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos. But the actual object of his Twitter onslaught is the domain of Jeff Wilke, Bezos' right-hand man for most of the past 18 years. Wilke runs Amazon's worldwide consumer division, meaning he's in charge of both selling people stuff and figuring out how to deliver the items as efficiently as possible. Often, the company uses the U.S. Postal Service.

Researchers in Singapore say they've built a robot that was able to put together a chair from IKEA in about 20 minutes.

Singaporean scientists have asked the question "Can robots assemble an IKEA chair?" and come back with enough of a "Yes" that The Register feels it time to call for robots to take this job away from humans. Take this job away from us! The boffins behind this breakthrough, assistant professor Pham Quang Cuong and a team of students, all of Nanyang Technological University, were cognizant of previous attempts at unpacking flat-pack kit that had used bespoke kit. So they instead used off-the-shelf robots and open-source code like the Point cloud library and gave them the job of assembling a "STEFAN" chair. As the video below shows, the bots clearly know Bob The Builder's couplet: "Can we build it?

When it comes to robots stealing our jobs, there's one task that plenty of people would be happy to relinquish: assembling flat-pack furniture. The day we can handball that job off is a step closer. In Science Robotics today, a trio of roboticists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore unveiled a semi-autonomous pair of robotic arms that can put together the frame of an IKEA chair. Made from off-the-shelf gear, their invention can look at chair parts scattered around, grasp and lift the right bit, carefully insert wooden pins in pre-drilled holes and slot the pieces together. And while the robot's repertoire of furniture-building skills is limited -- it can't yet screw in metal screws, for instance -- the technology could soon be ready for jobs that require human-like dexterity, such as electronics and aircraft manufacturing.

Sifting through pages of instructions and a jumble of screws and bolts to build the low-cost Swedish furniture may soon be a thing of the past given advances in technology, say researchers at the city-state's Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

Those who fear the rise of the machines, look away now. In a laboratory in Singapore two robots have mastered a task that roundly defeats humans every weekend: they have successfully assembled an Ikea chair. Engineers at Nanyang Technological University used a 3D camera and two industrial robot arms fitted with grippers and force sensors to take on the challenge of building an £18 "Stefan" chair from the furniture company. Working together, the robots completed the job in 20 minutes and 19 seconds after having the parts placed in front of them. More than half of the time was spent planning moves, with the execution taking nine minutes in total.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos tours the facility at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Jan. 29, 2018. Amazon's Jeff Bezos said it counts more than 100 million paying members for Amazon Prime, the delivery and content business that's at the heart of its sales growth. The CEO and founder, in his annual letter to shareholders, said last year more members joined Prime than in any previous year. Prime subscribers spend a lot more on Amazon -- $1,300 per year on average -- compared to about $700 for non-Prime members, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up," said Bezos. We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's'wow' quickly becomes today's'ordinary'. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something's in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well.

What happens when you combine the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Edge Computing? Before I tell you, let's review each one and discuss what AWS has to offer. Internet of Things (IoT) – Devices that connect the physical world and the digital one. The devices, often equipped with one or more types of sensors, can be found in factories, vehicles, mines, fields, homes, and so forth. Important AWS services include AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Device Management, and Amazon FreeRTOS, along with others that you can find on the AWS IoT page.