Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in two books: The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind (which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT). He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard (1950) and Princeton (1954). In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator.

Chinese search engine company Baidu is announcing today the release of Melody, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (A.I.) that lives inside the existing Baidu Doctor app for Android and iOS. This app collects medical information from people and then passes it to doctors in a form that makes it easier to use for diagnostic purposes or to otherwise respond to. For now, the chatbot only communicates in and understands Chinese and is only available to patients and doctors in China. The app that Melody is placed in lets users ask medical questions and make appointments to meet with their doctors. Melody goes one step further; it reduces the amount of time patients and doctors have to spend exchanging basic information.

In the last post, we highlighted the disruption that chatbot technologies are poised to make in call centers. To recap, we are seeing the trend that Generation X and Y have now shown a preference for text-based communication over voice. This results in consumers increasingly wanting to talk with brands via messaging platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion of conversational A.I. technology tools and frameworks in which natural language processing can be used to automate customer support inquiries. As the last installment discussed, this trend provides a compelling opportunity for companies to drastically reduce the costs of running their call centers. But the disruption goes further.

Nintendo is helping to implement the use of speech recognition software in Japanese schools, in partnership with telecom company NTT. As part a project currently being trialed, speech can be captured from a classroom teacher, and relayed as text on a student's DS handheld console. Nintendo's handheld console is no stranger to classrooms in Japan, with it already being used in educational settings for a variety of purposes. There are a broad range of educational titles available for the DS in the region, which focus on topics such as science, math, learning languages or even writing Kanji. This latest use of the console is unique though, in its attempt to improve accessibility in the classroom, for children with hearing or other learning difficulties.

Stuart Russell is a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, Associate Editor of the Journal of the ACM, and author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (Prentice Hall, 1995, 2003), the leading textbook in the field. His research interests include machine learning, limited rationality, real-time decision-making, intelligent agent architectures, autonomous vehicles, search, game-playing, reasoning under uncertainty, and commonsense knowledge representation. UBIQUITY: The original grand vision of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1950s and '60s seemed to dissipate into many small, disparate projects. Should this fragmentation be written off as an inevitable Humpty-Dumpty problem or is it possible to bring the fragments back together into a single field? RUSSELL: I think we can put it back together in the sense of being able to join the pieces.

UBIQUITY: Congratulations on "What the Dormouse Said" it's a fascinating book. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

The Amazon Echo is much more than just a connected speaker. Paired with its Alexa voice-enabled assistant, the cylinder of sound is a new platform on which people can access cutting edge products and services like Uber and Spotify. But like most tech, you only get out of the Echo it what you put into it. These 10 Echo "skills" (Amazon's name for Echo apps) will turn your Echo from a headline-reading automaton into a true digital assistant, capable of informing, entertaining, informing, and even challenging you. You can add them to your Echo via Amazon's Alexa companion smartphone app.

Typically it would go here," says Bradsher. And when the language engine sputters, Musio can always rely on a joke to keep the conversation flowing. "Initially our goal should be maybe to give them fun, rather than just complete sentences and the perfect response," Shin says. True to form, Musio introduces himself with a crowdpleaser. "I can talk, tell a joke and communicate with other things," Musio says, pausing with a comic's timing before adding, "Wait I can do this too." He then lets out a flatulent sound for a solid 2 seconds, because kids may want a "smart" toy, but never at the expense of fun.

Ryan Hait-Campbell says his San Francisco company's invention is really about jobs. Deaf people like himself, explains the MotionSavvy CEO, are too often shunted into positions that don't require talking to anyone--washing dishes, fishing or other solitary vocations that often have low wages, little opportunity for advancement and no need for an employer to hire an interpreter. One study found that only 58% of working-age Americans with a severe hearing impairment have a job at all. MotionSavvy's first product, though still in prototype stage, could revolutionize the prospects of millions who are deaf or hard of hearing. Called Uni, the device clasps around a PC tablet and uses MotionSavvy software to act as an interpreter between a signer (who can't speak) and speaker (who can't understand sign language) in very-close-to-real-time.

Qrio – short for quest for curiosity – is Sony's 58-centimetre-tall, all-dancing, bipedal humanoid robot. Qrio is famous for such feats as conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony, navigating an assault course, and even roller-skating. See footage of four QRIOs performing a complicated dance routine, (Windows Media Player required) recorded in December 2003. Starting in 2002, MIT spin-off iRobot, of Massachusetts, US, finally brought domestic robots to the masses, with their small and affordable Roomba and Scooba vacuuming and mopping robots – retailing at less than $200. Sales of all household robots have boomed, and in 2005 more than a million were thought to be in operation worldwide.