We've seen some clever ways to order food online in our day, but this one is decidedly off the wall. Taco Bell is testing TacoBot, a chat AI that helps you order (what else?) tacos in a Slack conversation. Think of it as a tasty text adventure -- you can ask questions about the menu, customize your order and check your cart. It's only in a private beta with a few companies at the moment, but you can sign up for a waiting list to have your Slack team give TacoBot a try. Just think -- you could have tacos sent your way while you're stuck in a planning session.

Emotional intelligence is a cornerstone of human interactions--an essential part of what it means to be human. But now, artificial intelligences are being developed to better read and process human emotions, which is already changing the way we interact with robots. In the early 1990s, psychologists Salovey and Mayer were the first to recognize emotional intelligence as a set of knowledge and skills distinct from other forms of intelligence, defining it as "the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." Emotional intelligence is something that seems wonderfully and innately human. But it turns out the tenets of emotional intelligence--which we start picking up in infancy and which seem so closely linked to human nature itself--can be quantified and reduced to logical procedures and algorithms.

One of the most important things that ever happened to Dan Faggella was a collapsed roof. The then 25-year-old had been building his own business in his hometown of Wakefield, Rhode Island: a martial arts gym focusing on his specialty, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. "I was 17 or so when I first learned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and I really fell in love with the'chess game' aspect of the martial art," Faggella says. When his teacher's studio closed, he used the money he'd earned from teaching private lessons and working at a local beach to open his own studio, which grew from a rented space in someone else's gym to a 500-square-foot training area to 2,500 square feet of his own. At the same time, he was using his earnings from the studio to pursue what might seem like a very different path: a one-year Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under well-known author and positive psychology expert Martin Seligman.

Automation has infiltrated nearly every facet of our lives -- but in the realm of managing money, the robot invasion is a welcome technological development. Where traditional money managers rely on their individual expertise to pick and manage investments for client portfolios, a robo-advisor uses computer algorithms to scour the world of investment options, calculate all the possibilities, and curate the ideal mix of investments for investors. These automated investment services are built with the kind of technology that would make the geekiest mathlete salivate. But it's the seamless, easy-to-use interface that makes robo-investing an appealing option for investors looking for low-cost, easy ways to invest. In five years, assets under management by robo-advisors will increase 68 percent annually to about 2.2 trillion, according to consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

Employing artificial intelligent robots in Chinese restaurants – an idea that attracted national headlines – has not proved such a smart idea after all, mainland media reports. A number of restaurant owners have chosen to fire about 10 robots because they were just not clever or sophisticated enough to do their jobs properly, the Xiamen Daily reported. The plug has been pulled on a number of the robots – employed as chefs and waiters – only a few years after a catering business in the seaport city of Xiamen, in southern Fujian province, scrambled to employ them instead of people, the newspaper said on Tuesday. Workers are ready for the robot revolution, but are their managers? Another restaurant, which opened last October, made local headlines for using four automated waiters that were able to take orders and deliver food to customers' tables.

Roy Harold Scherer Jr worked as a truck driver on the long haul to the top of his chosen profession. He later found film stardom under the name of Rock Hudson. Michael Dell, founder of US company Dell Computers, washed plates and was a waiter in Chinese and Mexican restaurants before he landed on a career in technology. Such humdrum tasks once allowed ambitious people to earn cash en route to the top. For others, they were full-time jobs.

When we go grocery shopping, we often have a standard list of things to buy. Each shopper has a distinctive list, depending on one's needs and preferences. A housewife might buy healthy ingredients for a family dinner, while a bachelor might buy beer and chips. Understanding these buying patterns can help to increase sales in several ways. While we may know that certain items are frequently bought together, the question is, how do we uncover these associations?

Children play and learn through educational toys about anatomy, chemistry, physics, and biology. They improve their memory or explore their creativity. Happiness science is so new it has yet to break into manufacturing with full force like other science based games and toys for children or adults. Given the leading edge of happiness research and the advent of advanced mobile medical technology, we are able to merge software with hardware in a way that has never been done before giving us the opportunity for positive robotics. Making a programmable robotic teddy bear who is abreast in how to help your child feel better may seem like a no brainer.

Using machine-learning to forecast which accused perpetrators of domestic violence -- particularly those whose crimes result in injuries -- will be re-arrested on similar charges can cut such recidivism in half, according to a recent report. Machine learning used during the arraignment process prevented "well over" 1,000 domestic violence incidents annually in at least one large metropolitan area, according to authors Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School, and Susan B. Sorenson, director of the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence. For their study, "Forecasting Domestic Violence: A Machine Learning Approach to Help Inform Arraignment Decisions," Berk and Sorenson analyzed 28,646 domestic violence arraignments that led to official charges and the corresponding releases. "Under current practice, about 20 percent of the individuals released after arraignment are arrested for domestic violence within two years. If magistrates only released offenders our forecasts identified as good bets… [f]ailures could be cut in half."

I believe Richard Feynman was one of our greatest scientific minds. He had a very particular way of looking at the world thanks to his father, and it was to look at the world around him as if he were a Martian. Like a fish born into water, it's hard to actually see water as being water, because it's all a fish ever knows. And so as humans, it's a good idea to try and step outside of our usual frame of mind, to see what it is we as humans think and do, from the perspective of a mind totally alien to our everyday environment. With that in mind, here's what humans are doing right now, from the perspective of someone from far, far away... What an interesting place and an interesting time it is for a visit.