Artificial intelligence and all its supporting tools, e.g. machine and deep learning in computational intelligence-based systems, are rebuilding our society (economy, education, life-style, etc.) and promising a new era for the social welfare state. In this paper we summarize recent advances in data science and artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial computation. A review of recent works published in the latter field and the state the art are summarized in a comprehensive and self-contained way to provide a baseline framework for the international community in artificial intelligence. Moreover, this paper aims to provide a complete analysis and some relevant discussions of the current trends and insights within several theoretical and application fields covered in the essay, from theoretical models in

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Over the last decade robotics has attracted a great deal of interest from teachers and researchers as a valuable educational tool from preschool to highschool levels. The implementation of social-support behaviors in robot tutors, in particular in the emotional dimension, can make a significant contribution to learning efficiency. With the aim of contributing to the rising field of affective robot tutors we have developed ARTIE (Affective Robot Tutor Integrated Environment). We offer an architectural pattern which integrates any given educational software for primary school children with a component whose function is to identify the emotional state of the students who are interacting with the software, and with the driver of a robot tutor which provides personalized emotional pedagogical support to the students. In order to support the development of affective robot tutors according to the proposed architecture, we also provide a methodology which incorporates a technique for eliciting pedagogical knowledge from teachers, and a generic development platform. This platform contains a component for identiying emotional states by analysing keyboard and mouse interaction data, and a generic affective pedagogical support component which specifies the affective educational interventions (including facial expressions, body language, tone of voice,…) in terms of BML (a Behavior Model Language for virtual agent specification) files which are translated into actions of a robot tutor. The platform and the methodology are both adapted to primary school students. Finally, we illustrate the use of this platform to build a prototype implementation of the architecture, in which the educational software is instantiated with Scratch and the robot tutor with NAO. We also report on a user experiment we carried out to orient the development of the platform and of the prototype. We conclude from our work that, in the case of primary school students, it is possible to identify, without using intrusive and expensive identification methods, the emotions which most affect the character of educational interventions. Our work also demonstrates the feasibility of a general-purpose architecture of decoupled components, in which a wide range of educational software and robot tutors can be integrated and then used according to different educational criteria.