A burger-flipping robot invasion is headed to the Bay Area. A few years ago, startup Momentum Machines unveiled a robot that could churn out 400 burgers an hour, and now, Tech Insider reports, the company is creating a restaurant concept around it. The robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans. A Craigslist job ad says the restaurant will open at 680 Folsom St. in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood; the ad doesn't specifically mention robots, instead reading, "This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford." The restaurant will still need to employ a human for tasks such as payroll and taking out the trash, however.

A robot-powered burger joint is coming to San Francisco. In 2012, secretive robotics startup Momentum Machines debuted a machine that could crank out 400 made-to-order hamburgers in an hour. It's fully autonomous, meaning the robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, and assemble and bag the burger without any help from humans. Years of relative silence ensued, but in January, Hoodline's Brittany Hopkins learned that the San Francisco-based startup had applied for a building permit to convert a ground-floor retail space in the SoMa neighborhood into a restaurant. Now it looks like the restaurant is actually happening.

With search engine optimization (SEO) maintaining its presence as one of the most effective marketing techniques on the Internet, it's no wonder that over time, new technical changes in algorithms have made the task of ranking both sites and keywords more difficult to understand and execute. While this used to be an easy task that involved including keywords into the content of your website, Google has continually progressed its ranking technology to provide more quality results to its users. With the launch of RankBrain, Google's new algorithm solution, earlier this year, has it stepped into the field of artificial intelligence? One might think so, as RankBrain queries for so much more than the keywords of the past, taking SEO to the next level. Understanding RankBrain, boils down into recognizing that Google wants to provide users ranking content that is relevant. The way users are using Google to search has changed, as now it is seeing complete questions and more complicated keyword searches being inputted.

Artificial intelligence – fuelled by big data – and blockchain tech, are some of the technologies that could impact our world, according to Sarwant Singh, senior parter at Frost & Sullivan. Speaking at the Global Community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL Europe) conference, held in London today, Singh discussed mega trends in the technological world in an attempt to examine their implications on businesses and societies. "I believe we are now entering the cognitive area," said Singh in reference to artificial intelligence, adding: "We'll move towards super intelligence [in the future]. It is not available today". By super intelligence, Singh was referring to the possibility that computers may eventually be able to function similarly to the human brain.

Chicks born with a bit of quail brain spliced in. Rats with their brains synced to create a mind-meld computer. For two days in June, some of neuroscience's most extraordinary feats were debated over coffee and vegetarian food at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science in Philadelphia. The idea wasn't to celebrate these accomplishments but to examine them. Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, assembled a group of scientists, philosophers and policy-makers to discuss the moral implications for the animals involved.

The use of MRI as a diagnostic tool for mental disorders has been a consistent goal of neuroimaging research. Despite this, the vast majority of prior work is descriptive rather than predictive. The current study examines the utility of applying support vector machine (SVM) learning to MRI measures of brain white matter in order to classify individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). In a precisely matched group of individuals with MDD (n 25) and healthy controls (n 25), SVM learning accurately (70%) classified patients and controls across an unselected brain map of white matter fractional anisotropy values (FA). Using a feature selection approach, where maximal discriminative voxels were selected, classification accuracy increased to over 90%.

You don't hear many people bellyaching about the servant problem these days. In 1904, when Saki wrote, "The cook was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went," this lapidary witticism would have fallen on kind ears. The bourgeoisie of that era talked about the unreliability of hired help with the same willed petulance that we reserve today for conversations about how it takes three remotes to turn on our TV. Indeed, in today's world, it seems as if you'd be less likely to hear about a domestic walking out than you would someone falling in love with his virtual assistant. I recently used a virtual assistant named Amy for 10 days. We did not fall in love, but I should point out that Amy is underage because she is still in beta.

Some people finish a marathon, or climb Mt. Whitney, or get down to a certain weight, and that's it. They view that particular challenge as a sort of bucket-list accomplishment, and when they cross that finish line, they all but cross out fitness as a priority in their lives. They stop doing the things that helped them attain their goal and revert to poor habits. Soon enough, they're out of shape again (or have gained back all the weight).

Whether exchanging dialogue with our smartphones or scribbling characters on touchscreens, the Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) we interact with today are intuitive and foster'easy to use' input methods. Driven by speech, handwriting and touch, our technologies are continually progressing towards intuitive communication between humans and machines, and we are continuing to march forward. However, several advancements in artificial intelligence technology, such as machine and deep learning capabilities, have paved the way for the humanistion of our machines and devices. And there's one particular development in the AI space which has pioneered the ability for seamless human-to-machine interaction - cognitive ergonomics. Through cognitive ergonomics, system designs that allows machines to adapt and operate considering mental workloads and other factors, we are able to communicate with our devices as easy as writing a note on paper.

On the app's home page (above), Google has replaced the single activity dial graph with individual cards and dials for each goal, showing what you've done and how days you have left to meet it. Scrolling down will reveal a chart of your weight, recent workouts (complete with a map), and more (below). Hitting the floating action " " button lets you set new goals, log your weight, add an activity and more. As for the new goals, you can now get a lot more specific than before. It has more activities and more specific metrics, like steps, duration or times per week, day or month.