Try to learn Machine Learning breadth-first, not depth-first. Meaning, don't go too deep into a certain topic, because you'd get discouraged quickly.

Andrew Stein is a Software Engineer who leads the perception team for Waymo, a name that stands for'New Way Forward in Mobility'. Waymo is an autonomous driving technology development company that is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. What initially attracted you to AI and robotics? I always liked making things that "did something" ever since I was very young. Arts and crafts could be fun, but my biggest passion was working on creations that were also functional in some way.

Every year we get closer and closer to becoming a society that has everything automated for us using artificial intelligence. I myself can walk into my bedroom and say "Alexa, it's bedtime." She will then proceed to turn off my smart lights, ask me if I need an alarm set, turn on my window AC and then my ambient sounds. If I'm driving down the road and need to make a hands-free call, I simply say, "Hey google, call dad" and just like that I can talk hands-free via blue-tooth without lifting a finger. Of course there are theories that we as a society are becoming more reliant on technology which makes us lazy and dumb, but I ignore those types of thoughts and welcome the new age.

For the past year or so I've been trying to learn German, and the most difficult part in language learning is certainly vocabulary learning. The existing apps do a pretty good job at helping with vocabulary learning, with the only issue that creating the flashcards is a big time sink. Initially the idea was to have a pool of words one wants to learn, and then the app would just quiz the user and try to maximize the learning of the user. Context: When learning new vocabulary, it is very useful to learn words in context, for example pictures and related words. If we could group related words and pictures together, the learning would (ideally) be more efficient.

This article has spoilers for just about the entire Star Wars universe. When it comes to fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence technology, the Star Trek universe stands head and shoulders above all others. Series creator Gene Rodenberry's vision for the far future seems just as prescient today, in the era of advanced deep learning, as it did in the 1960s when he unveiled it. Unfortunately, this article is about the AI in Star Wars. Before I go off the rails, I should point out that I'm a light saber-wielding Star Wars fanatic.

I've been doing this for a year, and it's the most helpful learning technique I've found in 14 years of computer programming. I didn't go to school for it. I just learned by necessity because I started a website that just kept growing and growing, and I couldn't afford to hire a programmer, so I picked up a few books on PHP, SQL, Linux, and Apache, learned just enough to make it work, then used that little knowledge for years. But later, when I worked along side a real programmer, I was blown away by his vocabulary! We were using the same language, but he had memorized so much of it, that I felt like a child next to a university professor.

You immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world. Now, you're leading teams of people who are 10 or 20 years older than you, working on one of the fastest growing internet companies of the last decade. You have two options: sink or swim. That's the position Simon Eskildsen found himself in early in his career. He left his home in Denmark after high school, and moved to Canada alone to take a pre-college gap year working at Shopify. When he started, Shopify had 150 employees supporting tens of thousands of merchants. Now, it has 5,000 employees and over a million merchants.

Editor's Note: This article was updated on December 27, 2019 at 11 AM EST. The Robot Report spoke to Digital Dream Labs Founder H. Jacob Hanchar and added new information about relaunching Anki products and a potential subscription model and open-source Vector 2.0. Anki's robots might be making a comeback, after all. Digital Dream Labs, a Pittsburgh-based edtech startup, acquired all of Anki's assets – patents, trademarks, data, social media, and domain. It has hidden the Anki portfolio page from its website, but it remains active. Digital Dream Labs was founded in February 2015 by H. Jacob Hanchar, who has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Becoming data-driven and driving the AI-first strategy is the ultimate objective of most companies today as they are gearing towards a digital transformation journey. While the final results are gratifying, the journey of analytics or AI adoption can be slow. As a result, many analytics projects and startups ultimately fail to scale up or stand the test of time. In the last year, there have been several reports that suggested that a majority of data science projects will face failure. In fact, one report said that 87% of data science projects fail to move past the preliminary stages.

What a month it was for robotics. Whether it was Boston Dynamics launching its Spot quadruped robot, Shopify acquiring 6 River Systems or Universal Robots launching its strongest cobot ever, the robotics stories didn't disappoint in September 2019. Here are the Top 10 most popular robotics stories on The Robot Report for September 2019. Subscribe to The Robot Report's free weekly newsletter to stay updated on the latest analysis and news from the robotics industry. Since being acquired by SoftBank, Boston Dynamics promised to bring its robots to market.