Everything you do changes your brain. Right now, wherever you are, looking at these words is shaping and modifying the connections between neurons inside your head. It seems like a scary thought, but this process – known as neuroplasticity – is fundamental to our ability to learn new skills, keep hold of old ones, and form new memories. Imagine, then, if we could take control of that process. If we could target specific types of skills and cognitive processes, then we could teach our brains to be better at, well, anything.

At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Related: Would you bet against sex robots? AI'could leave half of world unemployed' Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your biped Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. This a clever little promotional commercial for IBM's Watson, with Carrie Fisher and some other people you might recognize: The best thing about this is that almost all of those robots were physically constructed, not CGI. And each of them has its own little vignette, which you can see on IBM's YouTube channel.

A fast-food chain with restaurants in 28 states is getting ready to start serving burgers and fries in Champaign-Urbana. Bruce Kim, director of franchise development for Checkers and Rally's Restaurants, said the company is in the process of awarding a franchise for up to three new Checkers restaurants in the area. "We are a quick-service restaurant," he said. "We are known for our seasoned, seared and grilled burgers; fries; grilled, all-meat hot dogs; crazy good chicken wings; golden fish sandwiches; and ice cream. "Our seasoned fries were named the best fries for 2015 by Yahoo." Kim said Checkers restaurants typically stay open late, with most of them serving customers in their double drive-thru until 2 or 3 a.m. The Tampa, Fla.-based chain has 828 locations nationwide, and the website Thrillist recently named Checkers the fastest-growing fast-food chain in Illinois. Kim said the chain is up to 20 Checkers restaurants and seven Rally's restaurants in the state, and the next step is to start building stores in Champaign County. "There is plenty of room to grow, and we are trying to build several locations in Champaign-Urbana," Kim said. "Our studies show we have room for three stores, with our growth franchise-driven." "The community has a good, solid income base, good ethnic diversity and lots of university students.

Alexa, what can you tell me about my health? Starting Thursday, Amazon's voice assistant will tell you how well you slept and how much more exercise you need -- at least if you have a Fitbit fitness tracker and an Alexa-compatible device, such as Amazon's Echo speaker and Fire TV streaming devices. Inc.'s answer to Apple's Siri, Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana -- is part of the online retailer's ambitions to control your living room, as people start embracing a "smart," automated home. You can already use voice commands to ask Alexa for weather, movie listings and sports scores. Ask about your sleep, and Alexa will tell you when you fell asleep and for how long.

Frank Rosenblatt, born in New Rochelle, New York, U.S.A., July 11, 1928, graduated from Cornell University in 1950, and received a PhD degree in psychology, from the same university, in 1956. He was engaged in research on schizophrenia, as a Fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service, 1951-1953. He has made contributions to techniques of multivariate analysis, psychopathology, information processing and control systems, and physiological brain models. He is currently a Research Psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc., in Buffalo, New York, where he Is Project Engineer responsible for Project PARA (Perceiving and Recognizing Automaton). SUMMARY A THEORETICAL brain model, the perceptron, has been developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, In Buffalo, New York. The perceptron is a probabilistic system, capable of learning to recognize and differentiate stimuli in its environment. Previous reports have covered the theory of a class of perceptrons based on ...

Biology seems to be a science in its own right, or set of sciences having common aims, and so it should have its own language and explanatory concepts; yet when any specifically biological concept is suggested and used as an explanatory concept it seems to be unsatisfactory and even mystical. There are many biological concepts of this kind: Purpose, Drive, elan vital, Entelechy, Gestalten.* Physicists and engineers seem, on the other hand, to have clearly defined concepts having great power within biology.

If ability to perform complex calculations were a sufficient criterion, then even a conventional digital computor could lay claim to more intelligence than any of usand perhaps we had better let it make away with the word and be done with it.

In either view, typical examples are closer where (only) positive examples ought to exceptional cases, case memory, analogy, to the prototype, and atypical examples and be.

Where the accountants have fallen down, however, is in their reluctance and sometimes inability to make intensive studies of different equipment and to specify their requirements for equipment. As one authority in the field of electronic data processing has pointed out, "Accountants, unlike engineers, take the equipment as given without bothering to specify their own particular needs." But after all things are taken into consideration, it is of primary importance that the personnel who are handling the details of the investigation have a good knowledge of the particular application to be studied. Executives in many companies have been dissatisfied with the help received from outsiders who are expert programmers and who know a lot about equipment, but who are unfamiliar with business systems. In some companies executives have found that their own personnel, who know the firm's particular data processing system, after three or four months of experience in which to grasp the logics of the computer and the intricacies of programming, are much more valuable than such outside experts.