What is Artificial Intelligence?

Probably one of the most sought after and most anticipated to improve tremendously in the future would be the search engines.

Google, Yahoo and Bing are yet the top 3 search engines in terms of the number of users and speed of data today. But these two criteria and others, will no longer be the main basis for any of these 3 search engines to win the battle.

In 2035, according to News of the Future, your search engines will be like a friend or your university librarian whom you can ask online or talk via phone anytime. Whatever questions you have in mind, you can talk it out with TalkTalk.

TalkTalk is the future of search engines. With artificial intelligence, search engines will turn into a talking machine!

TalkTalk is actually in the works today. Although 2035 is far from our time now, TalkTalk is already getting massive reactions from people who are quite curious and even doubtful if it will really happen in the future.

We don't know, Google might be the first to launch such a technology in less time than predicted.

Click here to read more about TalkTalk, Future of Search Engines

Would you like Nexi to teach you how human strangers trust?

Would you trust a stranger? Maybe not, or maybe yes, at some point. But would you let a humanoid teach you how humans develop their trust to strangers?

Probably, out of curiosity, you would say "Yes!" But, this is in fact, true and an on-going study among experts from the fields of psychology, robotics and economics.

This interdisciplinary study is a collaboration of the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, Robert Frank, an economist, and David Pizarro, a psychologist, both from Cornell. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers have taken advantage of a humanoid, named Nexi, a talking and moving robot.

Nexi, performs an actual conversation with participants using human-like hand and body gestures, which have been pre-programmed to mimic humans way of expressing or developing trustworthiness to strangers.

The study is conducted to determine, how humans interact with strangers, in a gesture or gestures that they might gain their trust.

Click here to read more about Nexi, Robot Teaching How How to Trust

There about 40 to 45 million blind people in the world, than the available affordable blind devices in the market today.

Each of these devices have both advantages and disadvantages, but each aim to help the blind avoid obstacles.

The latest is the new optical radar system, developed by two engineering students of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. As part of their curriculum, these students have created an inventive optical radar system that aids the blind move around obstacles.

This optical radar system uses a computer (as the brain), two video cameras and a laser light source to alert the blind of obstacles with signals which can be heard audibly.

The device perceives obstacles, including those above the head, by scanning the extent of its surroundings, taken from two diverse angles which is like how the human eye works.

This project was exhibited together with the other 90 student projects of BGU students in their Annual Conference of Projects in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Click here to read more about Optical Radar System, New Device for the Blind

Who would not like a treat? Something free that's worth a thousand bucks when actually sold. Yes, and it's Microsoft Robotics giving away its RDS software to anyone... no restrictions... for FREE!

What's an RDS by the way? It's Microsoft Robotics platform for developing your own robot using its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS). The new R3 version is a Windows®-based platform for academic, enthusiasts, and industrial developers to effortlessly produce robotics applications over a huge range of hardware available. All previous versions though have been integrated into this new version, RDS 2008 R3.

Why has Microsoft done such a good act? It is actually part of Microsoft's new philosophies, that by providing such tools for free would help to ignite a reform in consumer robotics, and start a new era in robotics technology.

The New RDS R3 is a set of development tools containing a visual programming interface and a 3D simulator which, when synchronized to work together with lots of tutorials on the side, will make one to start creating his first robot as easily as possible.

Microsoft RDS includes a programming model that makes it quick to create asynchronous, state-driven applications. Microsoft RDS provides a standard, conventional programming framework that can be applied to support a huge range of robots, enabling code and skill transfer.

You can download Microsoft R3 2008 here.

Click here to read more about Microsoft Robotics, New Microsoft RDS 2008 R3.

Our brain is made up of neural circuits continuously evolving to solve complex day to day problems. While there are robots controlled with "organic brains" like the wheeled Robot with a Rat Brain of the University of Reading, for robots to move autonomously with an "evolving brain circuit" is far from reality.

Before, scientists and engineers alike would rely on sophisticated microprocessors and sensors to control the routines and functions of robots.

But just recently, researchers from Japan and Michigan have come up with the world's first brain-like "evolutionary circuit" that works just like the human brain (we hope so).

Being immensely analogous, this computer circuit allows immediate changes of ~300 bits unlike the world's fastest supercomputers which can only process bits one at a time in each of their networks.

The authors, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, from the National Institute for Materials Science, National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan and Ranjit Pati, of the Michigan Technological University Department of Physics, described their work as phenomenal, being able to solve problems instantaneously without knowing which specific algorithms are at work.

Click here to read more about Brain-like Evolutionary Circuit, Organic Molecular Layer