From friendship in a world of chatbots to what it means to be alive, this month's new popular science books are asking some big questions. Australia's tiger quoll - as featured in Dan Werb's Our Wild Familiars, out this month Life, being alive and death are big themes in the new popular science books out in July, not to mention that small thing of being a human and all the messy feelings and sensory stuff that goes with it. Then there's also AI filling the future - in ways that worry one of the world's leading forensic scientists, as well as ethicists who are paid to think about this sort of thing. I'm looking forward to delving into the worlds of volcanoes and pharmacology, which look positively safe and stable in comparison Can friendship with a chatbot ever be as good as friendship with a gang of flesh-and-blood besties? Is there still and will there - can there - always be something about human friendships that will elude the smartest of simulations?

Michael Wooldridge is the winner of the 2021 Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) Outstanding Educator Award. He gave a plenary talk at AAAI/EAAI in February this year, focussing on lessons he has learnt in communicating AI to the public. Michael's public science journey began in 2014 when the press and social media became awash with stories of AI. He wondered who was going to respond to these, often exaggerated, narratives and to add some nuance to the discussion. It turned out that nobody did, and there was a noticeable absence of expert opinion reported.

Statistical methods are used at each step in an applied machine learning project. This means it is important to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of the key findings from statistics and a working knowledge of relevant statistical methods. Unfortunately, statistics is not covered in many computer science and software engineering degree programs. Even if it is, it may be taught in a bottom-up, theory-first manner, making it unclear which parts are relevant on a given project. In this post, you will discover some top introductory books to statistics that I recommend if you are looking to jump-start your understanding of applied statistics. I own copies of all of these books, but I don't recommend you buy and read them all.