If the game Cards Against Humanity and those refrigerator poetry magnets had a digital baby bestowed with machine learning, it would look something like Botnik. This Seattle-based startup is actually the comedic offspring of Jamie Brew, previously a head writer for ClickHole, a satirical website connected to The Onion, and Bob Mankoff, cartoon and humor editor of Esquire and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker. "Bob and I started Botnik after a series of long phone calls converging on the idea that comedy writing isn't a problem that an algorithm can solve," Brew said. "We didn't really care for fully automatic creativity (such as Google DeepMind's attempt to win The New Yorker Caption Contest) and were far more interested in human-machine collaboration." Botnik builds a "predictive keyboard" of words taken from various sources -- beauty ads, nature shows, famous poets, dialogue from "Seinfeld" episodes and even combinations of sources, including the unlikely triumvirate that is Beowulf/Maya Angelou/forklift manual.

Gideon Mendels has spent the past three years in machine learning research, studying at Columbia University, building hate speech detection software at Google, and developing chat analytics app Groupwize with his business partner, Nimrod Lahav. In those roles, Mendels observed a recurring problem. Mendels and Lahav set out to solve that problem. The result is Comet, a suite of tools that help machine learning teams manage their experiments and projects. Comet tracks code, facilitates team collaboration, and allows developers to glean insights from past work.

This is the fifth post in our Startup Spotlight series featuring new robotics companies from around the world. We're inviting representatives from these startups to describe their technologies and how they see the marketplace. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Researchers have long been trying to build robotic hands that mimic the extraordinary capabilities of the human hand. The goal has been a device with size and weight similar to our own hands, capable of performing multiple grasping motions, and powered by advanced controllers.

Geosocial apps are having a bit of a moment. Tinder, Bumble, and a host of other services have emerged in recent years, promising to foster connections with real people, nearby. But online dating paved the way for these apps -- and even supposedly platonic services like Bumble BFF have struggled to shrug off the romantic connotation. So where does that leave people who aren't looking for love, but do want to use new technology to make friends? That question -- or "shower thought," as he puts it -- motivated Antoine Daher to create Patook, an app that connects people based on common interests.