She was totally skeptical of the idea that humans would fall in love with robots. She's still fairly skeptical, but she's beginning to appreciate something like this will happen. What happens if 50 years from now your predictions have not proved true, and humans and robots don't marry? I know some people think the idea is totally outlandish. But I am totally convinced it's inevitable. I would be absolutely astounded if I'm proven wrong--not if I'm a few years off, but if I'm proven completely wrong.

The crowd went wild, almost as if it were a World Cup match. Actually, it was RoboCup 2002. The annual robotic soccer tournament was held in Fukuoka, Japan, this past June as the World Cup was getting under way. The timing was no coincidence. The notion of robots taking on Brazil would be laughable if roboticists around the world were not so enthusiastically answering the call.

From the nature of the cosmos to the nature of societies, the following 100 questions span the sciences. Some are pieces of questions discussed above; others are big questions in their own right. Some will drive scientific inquiry for the next century; others may soon be answered. Many will undoubtedly spawn new questions. A number of quantum theorists and cosmologists are trying to figure out whether our universe is part of a bigger "multiverse." But others suspect that this hard-to-test idea may be a question for philosophers. In the first moments after the big bang, the universe blew up at an incredible rate. But what did the blowing? Measurements of the cosmic microwave background and other astrophysical observations are narrowing the possibilities. When and how did the first stars and galaxies form? The broad brush strokes are visible, but the fine details aren't.

Issac Asimov, widely regarded as the spiritual father of science fiction, outlined three rules that all robots in his future worlds must obey. The most important two were: a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; and a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. However, robotics in the real world has trouble striking a workable balance between these two requirements. Robots can perform tasks efficiently in controlled environments away from humans, or they can interact with humans if properly equipped with sensors to avoid any harm. But that degree of'sensing' also creates complexity and a lack of robustness to hardware and software failures which, in turn, affects safety.

The autonomous robots are designed to climb scaffolding and buildings by wrapping around a poll or beam and then rolling upward via an oscillating joint motion. Using built-in sensors and cameras, the robots would then inspect the structures or handle other dangerous tasks now done by humans, said Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Tech's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory and the faculty adviser on the project. The robots are each roughly three feet in length and use a movement unique even in nature. "These are really wicked cool robots," he added. The need for autonomous tools in the construction field is great.

There are several seemingly reasonable problems that are exciting and challenging, and yet are currently unsolvable. Solutions to these problems will require major new insights and fundamental advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. Such problems include: World Champion Chess machine, Translating Telephone, Discovery of a major mathematical result by a computer, and so on. Here I will present two such grand challenges which if successful can be expected have major impact on society: Self-Organizing Systems that learn from examples and observations and Self-Replicating Systems that can make copies of themselves.

Stanovov speaks about a speech-controlled wheelchair, which seeks to provide people that are quadriplegic, that is people with partial or total loss of use of their limbs and torso, with the possibility to control their wheelchairs through voice commands. In this interview Stanovov discusses the basic parts of the speech-controlled wheelchair, the fuzzy controller he created, and the trials they had in the medical center.

Distinct patterns of activity--which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face--even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward. The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights into care giving behavior, but also in cases of child neglect or abuse. "These adults have no children of their own. Yet images of a baby's face triggered what we think might be a deeply embedded response to reach out and care for that child," said senior author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that collaborated on the study.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence has captured our collective imagination for decades. Can behaviour that we think of as intelligent be replicated in a machine? If so, what consequences could this have for society? And what does it tell us about ourselves as human beings? Besides being a topic in science fiction and popular philosophy, AI is also a well-established area of scientific research.

Global Speech Recognition Market is expected to grow with market size of US $13 billion by 2022. Growing mobile banking application and adoption of mobile- and cloud-based computer technology is driving the Speech Recognition Market. The growing adoption of automated and smart applications in consumer electronics and healthcare industries act as the major contributor for the growth of the speech recognition market during the forecasted period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 50 market data tables and figures spread over 110 numbers of pages of the project report. Market Research Future has predicted that this market will be dominated by North America throughout the forecast period.