Welcome to the Silicon Valley Robotics Influencer series, hosted at HAX and curated by Cory Kidd of Catalia Health, Tim Smith of Element Public Relations and Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics.

It's a familiar adage but people still tend to highlight their successes and sweep their failures under the rug, as a professor at Princeton University pointed out last week when he published his "CV of Failures" (pdf), which has since gone viral. Now, in a study published this week in Nature, a team of researchers at Haverford College in Pennsylvania have taken this idea to the next level--by applying it to the scientific community. Even though most experiments fail, it is only the successes that are reported in scientific literature and discussed among experts. The vast majority of the data is discarded, left to collect dust in forgotten laboratory notebooks or never written down at all, making it effectively unavailable for use in further research. "Scientific literature is biased against failure," says experimental chemist Alexander Norquist, one of the study's lead authors.

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"Machine learning" will pave the way to delivering better experiences including "how quickly we can put apps on the X1 platform," Comcast EVP and chief technology officer Tony Werner explained here in an introductory overview at the Imagine Park opening session on Monday. He envisioned "a ton of very cool apps," comparing the ability of DOCSIS 3.1 to replace "a backhoe or forklift" in implementing new services for cable operators. "I love Full Duplex," Werner enthused about a symmetrical multi-gigabit project underway at CableLabs and being demoed here by Nokia, before he scooted off stage to support other Comcast executives at the opening of their nearby booth on the INTX show floor. As fellow panelist and visionary Andy Lippman, senior scientist and Associate Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, showed his "Ultimate Media" project, Werner quickly noted that, "You don't have all the online sources loving it." Werner cited the prioritization for certain news sources within the MIT algorithm.

When his father was diagnosed with stage IV, non-operable gastric cancer in 2007, Dr. Dimitris Bertsimas knew that combination chemotherapy was the best course of treatment. He visited several of the leading cancer hospitals in the nation--Dana Farber, Massachusetts General, MD Anderson and Memorial Sloan Kettering--to see what specific therapies they would propose for his father. "They each told me very distinct therapies, almost with no drugs in common," says Bertsimas. "I didn't know how to compare them." So Bertsimas, who is a professor of operational research at MIT did a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation.

After its attempts to digest romance novels, one of Google's artificial intelligence projects is now accidentally writing poetry, some of which would make the fictional Vogons proud. Google is working with Stanford University and University of Massachusetts in the US to enhance the natural language skills of an AI technique called recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM), which is used within machine translation and image captioning among other tasks. It essentially builds sentences a single word at a time by analysing the previous words in that sentence. Related: Poetry expresses what it is to be human – it's therapy for the soul Adam O'Riordan Currently, RNNLM is not capable of implementing global themes or features, such as a set topic, within its sentence generation. Each sentence produced by the algorithms doesn't necessarily flow smoothly into the next.

Smarter and more adaptive machines are rapidly becoming as much a part of our lives as the internet, and more of our decisions are being handed over to intelligent algorithms that learn from ever-increasing volumes and varieties of data. As these "robots" become a bigger part of our lives, we don't have any framework for evaluating which decisions we should be comfortable delegating to algorithms and which ones humans should retain. That's surprising, given the high stakes involved. I propose a risk-oriented framework for deciding when and how to allocate decision problems between humans and machine-based decision makers. I've developed this framework based on the experiences that my collaborators and I have had implementing prediction systems over the last 25 years in domains like finance, healthcare, education, and sports.

As the third industrial revolution - led by software - continues to gather steam, world leaders are predicting our entrance into the fourth industrial revolution. Can you guess what is leading it? We all dreamed of the day when robots would effortlessly takeover our mundane chores like doing the dishes, but the truth is that AI can already do more than that. AI is already driving cars, making art, beating humans at Go...and will soon take over your job! Forget science fiction, AI is already here and it is so close to getting so much bigger that governments are starting to prepare for this Tsunami. The White House recently released a report that highlighted staggering numbers for the job market due to AI.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ:AMZN)--Amazon today announced new Alexa voice features are coming to Fire TV, including the ability to control playback of Amazon Video and Add-On Subscription content, launch apps, access local movie show times, search local businesses and restaurants, and more--all just by using your voice. Discovering and accessing content on Fire TV has never been easier with the new Alexa playback features, plus integrated voice search across 59 content partners including Hulu, Showtime, Starz, HBO Go and more. These new Alexa features will be automatically delivered via free, over-the-air software updates in the coming weeks. "Customers have told us they love having the convenience of Alexa on their Amazon Fire TV," said Tim Twerdahl, General Manager, Amazon Fire TV. "We're excited to add new Alexa features to Fire TV, making it easier than ever to enjoy their favorite TV shows, movies, and apps."

But is the Big Data movement going to make a difference? I'm strongly in favor of cognition, computing, and computing that is smarter rather than dumber. But is the Cognitive Computing movement likely to make a difference?