This is the fourth in our AI in Fintech Week series. You can see the intro post describing the current state of the art in AI here. Today we look at a job that very few people understand. It is a job that requires an aptitude for math and statistics plus knowledge of complex domains such as life expectancy, healthcare, accidents, weather, wars & terrorism. Fundamentally it is a job that requires math and statistics; our AI friend Hal is heard to say, "I am good at math and statistics, give us a job".

Google is looking to sell robotics firm Boston Dynamics after concluding that it's unlikely to produce any marketable robot in the next few years, according to people familiar with the company who spoke to Bloomberg News. Boston Dynamics has become famous for its impressive (and impressively creepy) videos featuring it torturing its robotic creations with pushes, kicks, shoves and heavy weights, to demonstrate their versatility and reliability. Those creations include the quadrupedal "Big Dog" robotic mule, its lighter and quieter sibling "Spot" and the bipedal robot "Atlas". But the firm, which was acquired by Google in 2013, has failed to live up to the aspirations placed upon it. Its machines, which were largely created in response to military contracts, haven't been easy to adapt for potential commercial sale. And while Google had promised that Boston Dynamics wouldn't take any further military projects, the company still suffered a blow when the US Marine Corps rejected the Big Dog robot, saying it was too noisy for practical use.

Grafting plants is hard work: It helps reduce stress on plants' roots and create sturdier crops, but it can really stress out farmers. Humans have to struggle to cut plants just the right way and bind them together. That's where a new robot comes in: With the help of steel "hands," it turns plant grafting from tedious art into swift science. Vegetable expert Richard Hassell and his team recently revealed a new robotic system that grafts more quickly and efficiently than a human ever could. They modified a Korean-manufactured robot to grab two plants, precisely slice the upper shoot of one and the root stock of the other, and clamp the two parts together so they can grow into a single plant.

But while the idea of sinking your teeth into a tasty slice can be appealing, the bummer is the pesky delivery guy, who loiters in the doorway judging your slovenly outfit and your measly tip. They're fully enclosed, four-wheeled carbohydrate-dispensing machines, complete with heated and cooled, lockable compartments that require the purchaser to enter a passcode to retrieve their delivered food. Its space-age, Kubrickian exterior styling is sure to appeal to middle-age sci-fi geeks as well as neighborhood paintball enthusiasts. Domino's Pizza--which happens to share its hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Car and Driver--has a long history of delivery innovation, including in recent years electric vehicles and Chevrolet Spark–based custom delivery wagons. When it came time to go robotic, Domino's called in Australian technology startup Marathon Targets to help in the creation of its autonomous delivery vehicles.

Anyone who's ever shaken their head over the utterances coming out of Donald Trump's mouth will surely be glad to know that they're now being improved with deep learning. DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot created by a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab that uses a deep-learning algorithm to make even Trumpier statements than Trump himself. Based on an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on transcripts of Trump's victory speeches and debate performances, the bot shows a remarkable proficiency for taking the hyperbole even further. "I'm what ISIS doesn't need" is one creation of the bot, for example. "Great manufacturing, bring back our jobs, bring back our manufacturing, because my file, you know, I don't need anybody's money. The bot creates its tweets one letter at a time, apparently following Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again."

KOCHI: Saarang Sumesh made robots on his own long before he started going to school. The seven-year-old Class II student of Choice School, Tripunithura, is the youngest maker of robots in the state and, probably, the youngest in the country as well. The Palluruthy native, son of Sumesh V S and Srijaya, started building complex machines like internal combustion engine models from the age of three. By four, he began building the LEGO NxT robot models and started making his own robot models - walking stick for the visually challenged, house-cleaning robot, robotic hand, tricycle, humanoid robot - by the time he turned five. Now, he learns and makes new Arduino projects using micro-control kit (electronic kit) and Raspberry Pi. ''When I got the Lego robotic kit I was thrilled to make robots out of it.

Artificially intelligent computers understand Donald Trump not unlike artificially intelligent humans. His speeches read as extended phrases of semi-clarity interrupted by moments of utter horror. The source video is a CNN highlights reel from Donald Trump's presidential candidacy announcement in July 2015. I used audio volume (averaged over each frame) to dictate how deep to dream. For fun, I used a picture of Cthulu as a guide image.

The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement -- not so much to professional game players as to Google's competitors. Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry's lingo, the companies are engaged in a "platform war." A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow.

As part of an experiment on conversational understanding for artificial intelligence, Microsoft recently introduced an AI chatbot called Tay. The chatbot was linked up to Twitter and people could tweet at it to get a response. It didn't take more than 24 hours to turn the chatbot into a hate-spewing racist since it picked up all sorts of wrong ideas. Microsoft has now apologized for the entire episode. The company explains in a blog post that few human users on Twitter exploited a flaw in Tay to transform it into a bigoted racist. Microsoft doesn't go into detail about what this flaw was.

Data Analysis 2.2 Analysis of Technology Trends 2.2.1 Text Mining 2.2.2 Data Mining 2.2.3 Relative R&D Intensity 2.2.4 Results of Patent Index Analysis 3.Outlook for the AI Application Market 4.Tracking and Observing Highlights 4.1US Companies Should be Watched Closely as They Enjoy Absolute Advantage in AI 4.2 Autonomous Robots & Intelligent Virtual Assistants to Have Great Growth Potential Appendix Glossary of Terms List of Companies