To celebrate the first UK Robotics Week (25 June - 1 July 2016) Plymouth University organises an afternoon of academic presentations, followed by a public exhibition and debate on robotics and artificial intelligence. From 15:00 onwards you are welcome to a series of quick-fire academic presentations on cutting-edge robotics research by the University's research team. At 17:30 there is the opportunity to visit the robotics labs at the University and see robots in action, all while having a drink and chatting to our research team. This will be followed at 19:00 by a public debate on'Robots and Artificial Intelligence: bright future or impending gloom?'. As part of the UK Robotics week, Plymouth University invites you to attend a debate on robotics, artificial intelligence and its impact on society.

I have been invited to write a book chapter on lexical choice for translators (contact me if you want to see a preprint). To get acquainted on this audience different from my usual computer science I read a few papers on professional translators use of technology. Two of them are quite interesting and I recommend them not only because they make for a good read and they have implications outside translation: Translation Skill-sets in a Machine-translation Age by Anthony Pym (2013) and Is Machine Translation Post-editing Worth the Effort?: A Survey of Research into Post-editing and Effort by Maarit Koponen (2016). This search finished by reading a short ebook by researchers at the MIT Center for Digital Business titled Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. In that book plus the papers there's this call for humans, if we want to remain employed, to hybridize our work and to seek out ways to work with the computer as some sort of partnership.

Last week, the New York Times reported the first successful "limb reanimation" in a person with quadriplegia. Ian Burkhart, 24, had broken his neck as a teen in a diving accident. His spine was damaged at the fifth cervical vertebra, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Using nerve bypass technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles, he has regained control over his right hand and fingers. This is the first time a brain-computer interface has been used to help an individual move his own hands. The research was published in in the journal Nature, and explains how machine learning and MATLAB were used in this project.

A study has found that people are inclined to trust chatbots with sensitive information and that they are open to receiving advice from these AI services. The "Humanity in the Machine" report --published by media agency Mindshare UK on Thursday -- urges brands to engage with customers through chatbots, which can be defined as artificial intelligence programmes that conduct conversations with humans through chat interfaces. In conjunction with Goldsmiths University and experts at the likes of IBM, Mindshare UK observed how consumers use chatbots when making a banking transaction. It also surveyed 1,000 UK smartphone users aged 18-65 on their attitudes towards chatbots. The study found that 63% of people would consider messaging an online chatbot to get in touch with a business or brand.

This should not be construed as a negative article. I am myself a keen learner of technology. I contribute regularly to the research in technology projects of MIT, Mckinsey & Co, Harvard University, others, in projects related to Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. My concern is that in our enthusiasm to create and move technology forward, we are little less serious on creating safeguards and adversity proof environment. They create the temperature for your body according to the weather.

What better way to close out Machine Learning Month than with a list of free, open source books on Machine Learning and related topics like AI, statistics, data-mining and more? Joseph Misiti has compiled such a list and posted it to GitHub. Since this post is about machine learning, here's the Machine Learning portion of the list:

In the dataworld, there is a particular dataset, referred to as "the taxi dataset," that has been getting a disproportionate amount of attention lately. The dataset in question is comprised of staggering detail (full GPS, transaction type, passenger counts, timestamps) on 1.2 billion individual taxi, limo Uber trips from January 2009 through June 2015. Released by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the dataset became a darling of the data science set while also emerging as a popular test of database query speed. One of the leaders on the database performance benchmarking side is Mark Litwintschik, a consultant, blogger and database fanatic from the UK. Mark has tested more than 14 different databases/configurations using the dataset since it was first released in late 2015.

Ever seen a movie where artificially intelligent cyborgs try to wipe out humanity? Today, machines equipped with artificial intelligence are used in real life applications such as self driving cars -- and, surprise, they aren't out to destroy us. Now Kotaku Australia readers can learn all about this exciting, emerging technology with The Complete Machine Learning Bundle, priced at more than 90% off the regular price. The Complete Machine Learning Bundle offers access to ten courses and over 63 hours of content that can teach anyone important skills in statistics and data science, as well as coding languages like Python and Java to design algorithms that function on their own. Best of all, it's priced at just 52.23 AUD [ 39 USD], but only for a limited time.

Classic IVR automation already reduces customer service call costs by more than 90 percent--imagine what sophisticated A.I. can do. Join bot technology experts and A.I. scientists as they explore this and many other business implications of a world where bots join the conversation. "We've got to do something about how we communicate with customers," says Tobias Goebel, director of emerging technology at Aspect Softare. "We don't want to be stuck in the 20th century." He points to the primary market research that shows that the era of the phone call is coming to an end in a time when an entire generation rarely, if ever, makes phone calls, and even baby boomers would prefer to text customer service questions than pick up the phone to talk to a rep.