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.

EPOC communicates via Skype to Rovio

A mind controlled spy robot is rather expensive. If you don't have enough funds to support your enthusiasm, why not build one for yourself?

Yes, you can do it yourself! Let us take for example one engineer who wanted to build one for himself with just a few of the essential elements for the development; hardware, some software and brains to make it work.

Robert Oschler is just one of the robot fans who wanted to create his own version of ROVIO, a mind controlled Robodance. However this time he wanted to control it with his mind using the EPOC EEG Headset.

Remember the EPOC EEG headset which we also featured in this blog sometime in January of this year? Well, if you were able to get one, you will be able to use it to control your own spy robot.

How does it works?

1) He created a connection between the EPOC headset and the Robodance with his own set Emotiv Systems software developer’s kit (SDK).

2) The EPOC headset communicates with the Roboclient, a software program, which translates signals and sends them via Skype to another client computer.

3) The other computer interprets the date from Skype, and sends it to the Robodance software

4) Then, Robodance take these signals as robot commands, which are then communicated via WiFi to the Rovio

Just watch the video below and you'll see how cool it is.

Click here to read more about ROVIO, Mind Controlled Spy Robot