I-Chiao Lin is a computer vision specialist who builds AI applications for virtual reality headsets. Previously, she developed computer vision systems for baby monitors that detect a child's sleep quality. She spoke to us about how she prepares for job interviews, the lessons she has learned developing consumer products, and how a Pixar movie inspired her to pursue a career in AI. Tell me about your current job. What are your main responsibilities and what is your day-to-day work like?

An eerily human-like robot cashier who can serve drinks and chit-chat with customers will soon be up and running in Dubai, meaning baristas could become a thing of the past. Donna Cyber-Cafe is set to open in Dubai next year, with a'supermodel' robot serving coffees and ice creams to customers, without the help of any humans. Donna, who has been created to be the spitting image of Eastern European model Diana Gabdullina, will offer speedy service and will even be able to start conversations with customers, take selfies or tell a fairy tell for those who ask. The impressive new droid has been created to appear like a real person, allowing Donna to read customer's emotions and move in an eerily realistic way. Donna Cyber-Cafe will be opening in Dubai next year.

Art on the planet has been contentious for human society. It is an issue about which many people have strong feelings and often disagree about what it means, how it should be used, where it originates and its position in today's world. Art provides us with a variety of ways to express our creativity and emotions. Is there such a thing as a universal definition of art? Why is creating art controversial?

When you are angry, do you scowl, cry or even laugh? To what extent do your facial movements depend on the situation you are in -- whether you are in a formal meeting, say, or at home with your family? And do other people around the world express anger in such situations in the same way? These questions are at the centre of a contentious scientific debate about the nature of emotion that has raged for more than a century. Writing in Nature, Cowen et al.1 enter the fray.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that companies claim can "read" facial expressions is based on outdated science and risks being unreliable and discriminatory, one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of emotion has warned. Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, said that such technologies appear to disregard a growing body of evidence undermining the notion that the basic facial expressions are universal across cultures. As a result, such technologies – some of which are already being deployed in real-world settings – run the risk of being unreliable or discriminatory, she said. "I don't know how companies can continue to justify what they're doing when it's really clear what the evidence is," she said. "There are some companies that just continue to claim things that can't possibly be true."

Cows have their own language and talk to each other about food and the weather, according to a new study by scientists in Australia. They created a software programme dubbed'Google Translate for cows' to get a better idea of what the heifers were saying when they go'moo'. The study, by a PhD candidate from the University of Sydney, discovered that dairy cows also respond to positive and negative emotional situations. Cows each have their own individual voice and linked their moods to their'moos', said lead author Alexandra Green. Biologists made the discovery by listening to Holstein-Fresian heifer cattle, a European breed, mooing into a microphone and analysing the pitch.

People's understanding of supposedly'equivalent' words used to express emotions -- such as love, fear or anxiety -- vary greatly between different languages, a study found. Researchers studied words describing emotion in more than 2,000 languages and found'significant variation' in how emotions are expressed across cultures. For example, the researchers found that among the languages of the Pacific Islands, the words equivalent to the English word'surprise' are closely associated with'fear'. In contrast, the words for surprise in the languages of south-east Asia are more closely connected to concepts like'hope' and'wanting'. The team also found words with no equivalent in other languages, like Portuguese's'saudade', a deep melancholy for something lost, which has no English counterpart.

Nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone's lips. This was emphasised once again at the most recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, held in San Francisco in mid-September, where the topic was raised in almost every discussion. Machine learning is a particularly fertile area of Artificial Intelligence. Danny Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber, believes that the best way of describing the concept – which everyone is talking about without actually knowing exactly what it involves – is to regard it as a paradigm shift. "We're moving from a Newtonian, deterministic way of writing software, where the all-knowing programmer writes a complete model of your world, and we're seeing this major shift to more of a Heisenberg world, where it's about uncertainty and probabilities. Basically we're now using experience, using data, to have learning algorithms build and use these models and get results that are really predictions with probabilities, rather than having finite deterministic programmes. And as the world changes the data changes and we rebuild the models. This allows us to continuously have a software system that is more in line with the real world," he explained to the TechCrunch Disrupt audience.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your unibrowed Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two 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. We don't usually lead Video Friday with a long talk, but Nic Radford was at Campus Party in Mexico to talk about Valkyrie and the DRC. It's a tremendous talk, with lots of candid detail and video that we've never seen before.