Berkeley, a small town twenty minutes east of San Francisco, is home to UC Berkeley, the oldest campus of the University of California. This prestigious university is famous for its excellent institution and has been the Alma Mater for more than seventy Nobel prize winners. In 1973, the university discovered something shocking about its admissions: 44 percent of all men that applied for a PhD position at UC Berkeley were accepted, whilst only 35 percent of women were accepted. This seemed to indicate gender discrimination in the selection process!

Nowadays, they are everywhere. Netflix uses them to determine what your favorite series is. Facebook uses them to recognize and tag its users in images. Google uses them for their translators, to interpret spoken language and even to develop a chess-playing bot which can defeat any of its human or artificial predecessors.

On October 25th, 2017, Sophia became a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Even though this country has millions of immigrants among its residents, Sophia’s citizenship became world news. She was unique due to the fact that she was not born, but built. Sophia is a robot developed in Hong Kong that traveled around the world after her unveiling in 2016. She not only spoke at the United Nations but also became the first robot in the world to acquire citizenship. She appeared on numerous talk shows, in magazines, and even in videos around the world. Although interviews with Sophia did not always go smoothly, she became world-famous and brought the lightning-fast developments in artificial intelligence back into the spotlight.