"In a way, I've been thinking about this project since I was twelve years old when I typed up a list of all the scientific constants and rules that I could find..." Mathematician Stephen Wolfram is releasing a radical new browser/search engine, building on the theory in Wolfram's book "A New Kind of ...

Those pesky visual puzzles that have to be completed each time you sign up for a Web mail account or post a comment to a blog are under attack. It's not just from spam-spewing computers or hackers, though; it's also from researchers who are using anti-spam puzzles to develop smarter, more humanlike algorithms. The most common type of ...

Ph.D. student researcher Michael Rush, Thomas Sugar and Michael McBeath work with their ground-ball-fielding robot, Catchbot. Photo by John C. Phillips

Programming instructions for robots can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. Many roboticists believe that training robots by demonstrating new skills could speed up the process and enable the machines to perform more difficult tasks. Now researchers have created such a system for robotic helicopters. With their approach, the team can ...

Watch and learn: Researchers at Stanford University taught autonomous helicopters, such as the one shown above, how to perform tricks using an approach called ‘apprenticeship learning’. An ideal flight path was created for each trick using software that automatically analyzed video clips of the maneuver. Credit: Ben ...

The Convergence08 conference (www.convergence08.org) on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will use an innovative "unconference" format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive ...

Teachers and textbooks beware -- your future could be under threat from a quickly developing and very smart technology. At the center of this technology is a man who recently turned his face into a remote control - Ph.D. student Jacob Whitehill, of the University of California's Machine Perception Lab (MPLAB). More than just a wacky ...

Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. They used a combination of Genetic Algorithms and Neural networks to produce an environment where wheeled robots display both cheating and ...

The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08)- FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis - In cooperation with AAAI, March 1-3, 2008 - Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI -- to create intelligence as a whole, by exploring all available paths, including ...

Trailer of ''Ciao Robot - The birth of Roboethics''. Ciao Robot is a documentary which deals with the relationship between science and society, between man and machine. (www.ciaorobot.org) Speaking of robots and ethics, here's a different twist. Thanks to member Churchill for the link.