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On 1 April, the same day California's new 20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff. CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world's first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. "Eat the future," they offer. I visited CaliExpress last week to find out what an all-American lunch served with a side of existential dread tastes like.

The study of biases, such as gender or racial biases, is an important topic in the social and behavioural sciences. However, the literature does not always clearly define the concept. Definitions of bias are often ambiguous or not provided at all. To study biases in a precise manner, it is important to have a well-defined concept of bias. We propose to define bias as a direct causal effect that is unjustified. We propose to define the closely related concept of disparity as a direct or indirect causal effect that includes a bias. Our proposed definitions can be used to study biases and disparities in a more rigorous and systematic way. We compare our definitions of bias and disparity with various criteria of fairness introduced in the artificial intelligence literature. We also illustrate our definitions in two case studies, focusing on gender bias in science and racial bias in police shootings. Our proposed definitions aim to contribute to a better appreciation of the causal intricacies of studies of biases and disparities. We hope that this will also promote an improved understanding of the policy implications of such studies.

While robotic short-order cooks have been in development for a few years, their use in actual customer-facing businesses has been largely restricted to either independent or gimmick restaurants. But that changes today as Miso Robotics, maker of Flippy, and White Castle, maker of sliders, announce an Indiana-based pilot program that could one day see burger-flipping robots slinging patties and dunking fries all across the country. "The industry is facing some real, fundamental challenges," Buck Jordan, Miso Robotics CEO and Co-founder, told Engadget. "There's labor challenges due to self-sufficiency in kitchens, there's been a massive increase of delivery and now, of course, shifting consumer preferences towards low-touch establishments. These are all challenges that can be solved through automation."

AI has a "black box" problem. We cram data in one side of a machine learning system and we get results out the other, but we're often unsure what happens in the middle. Researchers and developers nearly had the issue licked, with "explainable algorithms" and "transparent AI" trending over the past few years. Black box AI isn't as complex as some experts make it out to be. Imagine you have 1,000,000 different spices and 1,000,000 different herbs and you only have a couple of hours to crack Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret recipe.

An autonomous, burger-flipping robot could soon greet you from behind the deli counter at Walmart. That's if the robotic kitchen assistant, named'Flippy,' passes the test at Walmart's Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. Depending on how it the trial goes, Flippy could be put to work at the retail giant's delis, according to Yahoo Finance. A robot could soon greet you from behind the deli counter at Walmart. That's if the robotic kitchen assistant, named'Flippy,' passes the test at Walmart's Arkansas headquarters Flippy, created by robotics firm Miso Robotics, has experience in several other kitchens, including, most notably, a short stint flipping burgers at a CaliBurger restaurant in Pasadena. The robot was later fired from the job after just one day, with CaliBurger said it was too slow to keep up with the crowds.

Hotels.com, part of the world's largest online travel company Expedia, wants to power all of its decisions with machine learning, with the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Expedia started using AWS back in 2013 to speed up various large-scale projects using capacity and traffic management. It has since been moving the vast majority of its workloads to AWS, and at AWS re:Invent last year, the company announced that it would be going all-in on AWS. That will include standardizing its use of AWS machine learning technologies across all of its brands, including Expedia.com, Speaking to diginomica at AWS Summit London last month, Fryer explains that this will mean all of Expedia group's applications, websites and products, along with supporting technologies such as those focused on data and machine learning, will move from its data centers over a period of time onto the AWS technology stack.

At the end of 2017, there will be 8.4 billion connected things in use worldwide up 31 percent from 2016, and this figure is expected to reach 20.4 billion by 2020. When Internet of Things (IoT) as an industry took off in India, it spawned a host of startups selling edge devices that could gather and crunch data from corporate customers. These startups ran into one fundamental problem, which was data lifting. The data was so voluminous that these startups took so much time to organise them that they ran out of money to keep the companies afloat. In the end, their services were just organising data for customers with very little insights.

It's never been a particularly sought-after job but now flipping burgers may not be a job for humans at all. Meet Flippy, a new "robotic kitchen assistant" from Miso Robotics that, as its name suggests, will automate the process of cooking those juicy patties. As Miso Robotics CEO and co-founder David Zito told TechCrunch, "We focus on using AI and automation to solve the high pain points in restaurants and food prep. That's the dull, dirty and dangerous work around the grill, the fryer, and other prep work like chopping onions. The idea is to help restaurants improve food quality and safety without requiring a major kitchen redesign."

Flipping burgers is a hot and greasy job. Slips, trips, burns and cuts are common hazards associated with the work. But global demand for burgers is tremendous. Top burger chains racked up more than $75.5 billion in annual sales in 2016. To help keep human cooks out of harm's way while fulfilling our collective appetite for burgers, Pasadena-based Miso Robotics is rolling out a new "robotic kitchen assistant" called Flippy.