It's half the size of the Statue of Liberty, has flashing eyes and steam rising from its body as it towers over puny humans by Tokyo Bay. This 18-meter statue has attracted millions of fans since it was built in 2009 to honor the famous machine from anime, which looks like a futuristic suit of samurai armor. But a consortium of Gundam devotees and companies says it isn't satisfied with a mere statue. It wants to build another six-story Gundam--a robot version that can actually move. The backers haven't decided whether locomotion for the giant would be possible, though it seems unlikely.

Workers who may be tempted to sell confidential corporate data should think twice about what they write in an email--an AI-based monitoring system could be watching. Tokyo-based data analysis company UBIC has developed an artificial intelligence system that scans messages for signs of potential plans to purloin data. A risk prediction function is being added to an existing product from the company that audits email for signs of activity such as price fixing. The Lit i View Email Auditor has been used in electronic discovery procedures in U.S. lawsuits. The artificial intelligence system, dubbed Virtual Data Scientist, can sift through messages and identify senders whose writing suggests they are in financial straits or disgruntled about how their employer treats them.

The Turing award, in existence since 1966, comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel. Last year's award went to Leslie Valiant, a Harvard University computer scientist. One past winner, Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, says Pearl's accomplishments have "redefined the term'thinking machine'" over the past 30 years. Pearl's efforts have had "a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science and statistics," Cerf said in a statement. The UCLA computer science professor is widely credited with coining the term "Bayesian Network," which refers to a statistical model ACM describes as mimicking "the neural activities of the human brain, constantly exchanging messages without benefit of a supervisor."

Microsoft reported Tuesday that a new "Catapult" board, running a specialized type of reprogrammable chip, improved the performance of its Bing search engine dramatically enough that it plans to deploy the technology in a data center in 2015. Baidu, one of the largest Web giants in China, reported similar results. Both companies presented papers at Hot Chips, an academic conference in Cupertino dedicated to describing improvements in microprocessors and related technologies. By now, graphics chips are accepted components of PCs and game consoles. Years ago, dedicated audio accelerators were, too.

Would you trust your computer to interact on a deep personal touchy-feely level with you, reading, interpreting, reacting, or storing your emotions? Most of us at some point have had one of those days when we've tried sweet-talking or cussing a malfunctioning computer, but what if the computer apologized? What if computers could sense your emotions and respond appropriately? Yet we are posed on the brink of computers recognizing and responding to users' emotions. An engineering and consulting firm, Design Interactive, reports it partnered with VRSonic to develop an Affective Virtual Environment Training System (A-VETS), a tool that uses "noninvasive" methods of evaluating emotional responses in real time. The A-VETS tool is targeted at military training and research community needs.

While debate on military robots heated up this month thanks to UN talks about the development of lethal autonomous robots--and military robots are evolving quickly thanks to defense budgets--household robots remain far from ubiquitous. More than a half-century after the world's first industrial robot, Unimate, began work at a General Motors plant, most commercial robots still work in factories. The ones that are in households, such as the roughly 10 million robot vacuum cleaners led by iRobot's Roomba, have usually been limited to performing one task only, like sucking up dirt. Computers and robots can beat us at dedicated tasks like chess or painting cars, though humans still have a massive intelligence advantage in terms of general knowledge. That's a good thing if you fear a robot uprising.

When Kenneth Wayne Jennings, noted for holding the record for the longest winning streak of 74 games on the U.S. syndicated game show, bowed to IBM's Watson as the new "Jeopardy!" That was probably one small step for a computer but a giant leap for computing. It's ironic to say that Watson's dominance on the game show didn't come out of the blue. The result was a culmination of over a decade of IBM's research. "It opened up a new chapter in information technology called cognitive computing--based on the idea of a natural interaction between systems and people," says Zachary (Zach) Lemnios, vice president of strategy for IBM Research.

An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects. The Pixy camera sensor board, being developed by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University, can detect objects based on seven colors, and then report them back to a computer. A Kickstarter campaign was launched on Thursday to fund the $25,000 project, and the organizations are on pace to reach full funding by the end of the day. Adding the Pixy could be viewed as giving robots basic vision, said Rich LeGrand, founder of Charmed Labs. "Once you have vision, then you can introduce the idea of tasks," LeGrand said. "If you want a robot to charge itself, that's a simple example of a task.

When Christian Johnson began his summer 2012 internship at the information management branch of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, he little suspected that he'd soon be virtually tooling around the center via a vaguely humanoid robot on wheels. Once classes began in the fall, the 18-year-old had to finish up his senior year of high school in Buffalo, New York and needed to telecommute to continue his work as data analytics specialist at the research center. One of his co-workers had heard about a company called VGo Communications that makes a wheeled personal avatar, or what it calls a "productivity improvement solution," that lets people see and hear--and be seen and be heard--from far away. The co-worker wrote a proposal urging Langley's CIO to buy a VGo unit, and the CIO's office approved the purchase of one of the robotic avatars so that Johnson could use it to move virtually through the building and attend meetings--just one of the new ways robots are making their mark in business today. Industrial robots have been around since the early 1960s and have been used mainly in automotive plants.

Facebook is acquiring a company that specializes in speech interpretation and translation software. The move, disclosed Monday, could help Facebook better connect its users across the globe. The deal to acquire Mobile Technologies was announced in a blog post by Facebook product management director Tom Stocky. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. "We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap," he said.