As the United States and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical. While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops. To move the technology forward, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $13.7 million grant, called "Linguistic Resources for Multilingual, Genre-Independent Language Technologies via its Broad Operational Language Translation" (BOLT) Program to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources. Brandeis has been given $2 million of that amount as a collaborator. Nianwen Xue, assistant professor of linguistics in the Language and Linguistics Program and the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis, is the principal investigator on the four-year project.

BERKELEY – When scale model helicopters pass through a makeshift "urban canyon" in a test field, or engage in a game of aerial "chicken", the drills may look like a robotic stunt show to outside eyes. Members of the university's Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program have successfully conducted a series of field tests with 130-pound helicopters that not only fly autonomously -- without human control -- but that also react to avoid obstacles in their flight path. "Our BEAR group is the first to successfully develop a system where autonomous helicopters can detect obstacles, stationary or moving, and recompute their course in real-time to reach the original target destination," said David Hyunchul Shim, a research engineer on the project who first began this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering. With these achievements, the researchers are inching towards a future of robo-copters that could maneuver through city streets or forested landscapes. The development of reliable systems that can handle obstacle-avoidance tasks is still several years away, researchers said, but the computational foundations for such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been laid.

Low birth rates and a potential future shortage of carers could mean elderly people having to rely more on'virtual' care, according to an expert speaking at an event organised by the British Computer Society (BCS). Around 50 forms of help - ranging from motion-activated lights to a fully-fledged robotic companion who could advise, interact and even entertain older people - could be the solution to the care burden predicted in years to come, Dr Kevin Doughty, deputy director of York University's Centre for Usable Home Technology told members of the BCS's specialist Northern health informatics group. By 2025 the ratio of adults of working age to those of retirement age is expected to be just 2.5. Dr Doughty, who ran a residential care home for six years, said: "With falling birth rates and an ageing population, the number of people able to look after the elderly is falling and will continue to fall. By using technology we will not only be able to support the elderly more efficiently, but they will be able to stay in their own homes and maintain a level of independence."

The future of AI is here and it's cognitive. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, professor at the University of California and vice president of the Fair Isaac Corporation, has discovered the universal mechanism of animal cognition and is now developing automated conversational customer service systems with human-level capabilities for use in a variety of industries. He believes his work may revolutionise the study of neuroscience and change the direction of AI research. Justin Richards, BCS, caught up with him to find out more. Please can you provide a brief overview of what you've been doing since your college years to the present day? Well since I'm old that wouldn't be very brief at all, so I'll summarise if possible! The fact is that since 1968 my passion has been understanding how cognition works and this is something I got into as a mathematics student, so I've always been leaning in the direction of trying to understand these things from underlying mathematical principles as implemented by neural tissue. Now as you know neurons are very difficult to study because the brain is a three dimensional structure and you can't even get at a neuron without destroying the tissue between you and it. Another problem is being able to witness the behaviour of neurons during normal behaviour is extraordinarily difficult. Even though centuries of study have gone on there's still very limited capability to do that. And if you can do it you can only do it for brief periods under extraordinarily tense conditions and you're never quite sure what you're seeing. So this is an important place where theory plays an important role because there is no theory that is definitive, so without a theory to tie it all together it's not very easy to make progress. Basically, I've been focused on building a theory, of course informed by the large number of microscopic facts that exist. So we know a great deal about the brain, and being able to appreciate and understand what is known, that's a process that takes decades in itself. And then being able to use that understanding to craft theories is a further difficulty. Anyway, I've been through all of that and have been working on this.

Computer pioneer and artificial intelligence (AI) theorist Alan Turing would have been 100 years old this Saturday. To mark the anniversary the BBC has commissioned a series of essays. In this, the fourth article, his influence on AI research and the resulting controversy are explored. Alan Turing was clearly a man ahead of his time. In 1950, at the dawn of computing, he was already grappling with the question: "Can machines think?"

Engineering autonomy into cars will not necessarily mean engineering out enjoyment. An autonomous vehicle, capable of driving completely by itself, is nascent technology, and as such can be nerve-racking. But when the sci-fi overtones die down, what is left is a deeply tested artificial intelligence system that is much like a human driver – only safer. There are many vehicles on the road that already incorporate some level of autonomy. Nissan's current Safety Shield tech suite incorporates systems such as adaptive cruise control – which can slow down or speed up a vehicle automatically by using sensors to determine to the location of other vehicles around it – and a 360-degree camera-view function.

September's emissions scandal rocked Volkswagen - but it's not the only issue the German car giant has. Alongside other German manufacturers, it faces a major challenge from the digital revolution sweeping through the world of manufacturing, writes Sean Williams. Max Vilimpoc, a Berlin-based software engineer, worked as a contractor for VW until this year. What he saw there, while working on a raft of digital products, shocked him. VW, he says, approaches the design of digital products the same way it would design a car part or engine component.

The World Robot Conference in Beijing has drawn big crowds to its showcase of "jiqiren", or "machine people", in Chinese. The country still has a long way to go until it catches up with Japan, among others, but on the evidence of the conference, it is only a matter of time before robots are cooking us dinner and cleaning up afterwards too. China is already the world's biggest market for industrial robots, according to the International Federation of Robotics. But many analysts at the conference said the future lay with "service robots", helping out around the home and office. Robot waiters are already a popular draw at some restaurants and tourists sights in China. In a world of declining birth rates, robots could increasingly keep the young, and old, company.

A robotic arm that combines a suction cup, a "two-fingered" gripper and a 3D depth-sensing camera has won Amazon's latest warehouse bot competition. Team Delft's machine triumphed over its rivals at both of the two tasks. One involved selecting products from a container, picking them up and putting them on a shelf. The other was doing the actions in reverse. Amazon already uses robots to move goods about its buildings but relies on humans to stock its shelves.

Pepper, the robot that has been trained to "perceive" human emotion, is opening up its platform to Android developers. Maker SoftBank is hoping that it will spur new apps and new capabilities for the humanoid robot which has sold well but still has no clear defined purpose. Ten thousand of the robots have been sold but developers have been slow to make apps for its closed Naoqi operating system. Android will run on a tablet strapped to the robot's chest. Neither Google nor SoftBank has disclosed what sort of business deal they have struck and it is unclear if the robot will take advantage of new features such as the recently announced artificial intelligence Google Assistant. But it will almost certainly offer Google some degree of control over the robot as well as a cut of revenues.