PETMAN is an adult-sized humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics, the robotics firm best known for the BigDog quadruped. Today, the company is unveiling footage of the robot's latest capabilities. The humanoid, which will certainly be compared to the Terminator Series 800 model, can perform various movements and maintain its balance much like a real person. Boston Dynamics is building PETMAN, short for Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, for the U.S. Army, which plans to use the robot to test chemical suits and other protective gear used by troops. It has to be capable of moving just like a soldier -- walking, running, bending, reaching, army crawling -- to test the suit's durability in a full range of motion.

The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design. EvoMUSART 2005 is the third workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2005 is to bring together researchers who are using Evolutionary Computation in this context, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area. The workshop will include an open panel for the discussion of the most relevant questions of the field.

General International AI conference held in India. Specification, design, implementation and evaluation of intelligent and adaptive graphics that will provide the technical core of the next generation of interfaces. To assemble researchers from the Nordic countries, with some additional international participation. The workshop supports research linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts with computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, organization theory and law.

Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine"spoke" more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair. Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. "They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle,operate our society increasingly well without us," he concludes, oddly cheery.

Few concepts capture the human imagination more than robots, undoubtedly because they are often designed to mimic us. Even their technological development seems to parallel our advances. We can judge the progress of our ability to harness scientific achievement simply by looking at a robot and asking this question: Exactly how much is this machine like a human? Or as Matt Mason, head of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says, "In studying robotics we're really just studying ourselves." To take a measure of our progress, Discover offers a look in that mirror as we analyze the 25 greatest stepping-stones in robotics, points in time where science fiction meshes with science fact.

Collective Intelligence: It's All in the Numbers (Abstract)

James A. Hendler, Edward A. Feigenbaum: Knowledge Is Power: The Semantic Web Vision.

From 2008: "WALL-E" trailer features the stars from "Toy Story." The results are in, and the latest laureates in the Robot Hall of Fame range from the absolutely lovable WALL-E cartoon character to the positively scary BigDog robo-runner. This year's class, announced during a Tuesday night ceremony at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, also includes the pint-sized, soccer-playing NAO humanoid robot and the PackBot bomb-disposal robot. The Robot Hall of Fame was created in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University to recognize excellence in robotics technology. More than two dozen machines, real and fictional, have been inducted over the past nine years, but the Class of 2012 is the first to be selected by popular vote instead of a panel of judges.

The dawn of the 21st century has been called the decade of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely operated by pilots in the United States, rain Hellfire missiles on suspected insurgents in South Asia and the Middle East. Now a small group of scholars is grappling with what some believe could be the next generation of weaponry: lethal autonomous robots. At the center of the debate is Ronald C. Arkin, a Georgia Tech professor who has hypothesized lethal weapons systems that are ethically superior to human soldiers on the battlefield. A professor of robotics and ethics, he has devised algorithms for an "ethical governor" that he says could one day guide an aerial drone or ground robot to either shoot or hold its fire in accordance with internationally agreed-upon rules of war. But some scholars have dismissed Mr. Arkin's ethical governor as "vaporware," arguing that current technology is nowhere near the level of complexity that would be needed for a military robotic system to make life-and-death ethical judgments.

If you've ever been struggling with a foreign language dictionary abroad, wishing that you could simply speak into a machine and have your chat translated for you, NTT (News - Alert) Docomo may be ready to make your wish come true. The company, which is Japan's number one cell phone carrier is about to begin offering a new real-time speech-to-speech translation service that you can use both in person and over the phone during a call, according to Geek.com According to Japanese news services, the solution is the first automated chat translation service in the world that is available on a standard cell phone. The new product combines several cutting-edge technologies: advanced speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech conversion of the translated results, says Geek.com. The services to power the solution will be cloud-based, says NTT Docomo.