On a long-haul flight, there's nothing worse than being sat next to a chatty stranger. But songbirds don't seem to mind, as a new study suggests they are likely to'talk' to other species as they migrate. Last year, a team of scientists discovered that birds seem to'buddy up' with other species at stopover sites during migration, but there was no evidence that different species pair up or communicate vocally on the wing. But now it's been found that the birds may even chat to gather important information about the journey they are on. For their new study the researchers, from the University of Illinois, analysed more than 18,000 hours of recorded flight calls made over three years in eastern North America.

In the neural network training phase, especially with the backpropagation algorithm, we use the gradient descent principle to get the most minimal cost function possible. In linear regression, we can guarantee that our cost function will always converge because our cost function is convex. One and only problem in linear regression cases is if we set the learning rate too big. It will jump around and never touch slope equals to zero. If the learning rate is too small, it will eventually converge but it will take a lot of time.

Do you know that a full-time working translator can translate approximately 520,000 words per year? There would be no wrong in saying that the translation industry has existed for centuries and will progress in double digits in the upcoming years. Because digital realms continuously push for more shared and globalized experiences, the current worth of the global translation industry is $56.1 billion, and the figure is expected to increase at a swift pace in upcoming years. The number is projected to surpass $70 billion by the year 2023. It's been more than 10 years since the launch of Google translate by utilizing phase-based machine translation algorithms.

Gartner's 2017 Hype Cycle for Marketing and Advertising is out (subscription required) and, predictably, AI for Marketing has appeared as a new dot making a rapid ascent toward the Peak of Inflated Expectations. I say "rapid" but some may be surprised to see us projecting that it will take more than 10 years for AI in Marketing to reach the Plateau of Productivity. Indeed, the timeframe drew some skepticism and we deliberated on this extensively, as have many organizations and communities. First, let's be clear about one thing: a long journey to the plateau is not a recommendation to ignore a transformational technology. However, it does raise questions of just what to expect in the nearer term.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your melodramatic 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. I'm not entirely sure why being "targeted" by a bird robot like this would appeal to kids, but here you go: Fun fact: this works with real seagulls too. "This is a demonstration of Engineered Art's telepresence app on its Robothespian Humanoid robot. Although recorded multiple times to capture different camera angles, what you are seeing is a real conversation with Robothespian. It is being controlled and voiced remotely over the internet. There is no trickery here. Although we scripted some of the conversation to ensure it was repeatable, none of the content was pre-programmed. It was all created in real time using a headset and the telepresence app. It is an excellent way to ensure genuine human interaction, without being tripped up with it's complexities."