LONDON – They come from very different worlds, yet have remarkably similar tales to tell. One hails from Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, while the other was brought up in the shadows of the Merendon mountains in the Sula Valley of northwestern Honduras. Bonding over a "love of good coffee and jazz," Yasutomo Takano and Cristian Mejia have come a long way since they first met four years ago while studying bibliometrics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Back then they were both enthusiastic students with a love for robotics and the "internet of things." Now, they are using their combined skills to solve challenges in academia.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots continue to creep into our working lives. Not only are truck drivers, janitors, and bricklayers facing obsolescence in the near future but AI is also influencing knowledge work including paralegal, medical diagnostic and other professions that require less physical manipulation and more interpretation of data. Job automation has also extended to journalism and the creation of news and other content. It is possible that robots might infiltrate the scientific communication ecosystem in the same way. Robotics has been employed in newsrooms for several years, starting small but becoming much more sophisticated lately.