Board Games Research Group: develops high performance search algorithms and game playing programs such as Fuego, the first Go program to beat a top human player in 9x9 Go. Games Research Group: engages in the design, analysis, and implementation of artificial intelligence technology that is suitable for use in high-performance game-playing programs. Intelligent Reasoning Critiquing and Learning (IRCL) Group: conducts Artificial Intelligence research on real-time heuristic search, interactive story-telling and cognitive modeling. Our recent applications have been with video games. We have on-going collaborations with the Department of Psychology, UBC Okanagan, Reykjavik University and Disney Research.

Robin arrived at Edinburgh University as a Lecturer in 1965 and spent the next 20 years establishing one of the first world-class research groups in Robotics in Europe. He did visionary work in Robotics involving the integration of multi-modal sensing (including vision) into robotic control, and developed techniques for modeling and spatial reasoning about geometric objects. This work, which started soon after he arrived in Edinburgh, anticipated functional and higher order programming by over a decade. PoP-2 was the main language used by researchers in Artificial Intelligence in Britain during the 1970's. While on the faculty at Edinburgh University, he played a major role in keeping the fledging field of Robotics alive in Britain after the Lighthill report on Artificial Intelligence precipitated a major decrease of funding in this area.

In April 2008 I wrote "Where Have All the Great Programmers Gone?" . In trying to answer the question, I contrasted the contemporary introduction to programming with the way it was learned in the 1950s. The first was that one of the prerequisites for being a promising oddball was that of having a nontrivial college degree. Examples were philosophy (J. A. Robinson), English literature (Mark Halpern), Classics (C. A. R. Hoare), Physics (E.W. Dijkstra). Being thrown into the deep end in this way was educative, something that cannot be said of the typical first-year programming text, dumbed down in the way that only Educators have the secret of. A Programmer's Place (APP) has yet to snag Hoare or Halpern, but was fortunate to find J.A. Robinson available for an interview.

The effective use of argument is, of course, central to the practice of Law, and it is important that students of Law learn this skill. We describe here the architecture of a computer-based system to enable students to practice argumentation in a regulated environment. The system makes use of the concept of a dialogue game as a means of providing the necessary rule-governed structure for the conduct of an argument between two students, or a student and a teacher. The architecture described is generic in that it can be instantiated with different forms of dialogue game. This instantiation is achieved by the use of performatives to specify the rules of the game and the semantics of operations within the Dialogue Abstract Machine that is used to implement it.

Oulu, Finland based Start-up Valossa has released its new video search tool. The technology analyses video streams in real-time to identify more than one thousand concepts such as places and objects from any video stream. Valossa technology understands the contents of video files themselves through a combination of natural language processing and pattern recognition AI. It has been designed for service and content providers enabling users to can reach down into their video content, identify it and make it searchable. Sometimes the most profound solution is to change the entire problem.

Germany's RDK8 is the world's most efficient coal-fired power plant. The U.N. and governing bodies around the globe are setting new goals for reducing carbon emissions, but that doesn't change the fact that a big portion of the world is still largely reliant on coal-generated power. Moreover, the firms running coal-fired plants aren't going to simply give up on their investments. That's why GE this week unveiled a new set of digital technologies that, using data science, software and intelligent automation, can optimize any coal-fired power plant. If the new, equipment-agnostic technology, called "Digital Power Plant for Steam," were deployed at every existing coal-fired power plant globally, it could eliminate 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, GE says -- the equivalent of removing 120 million cars from the road.

Self-driving cars have barely hit the road -- and aren't even close to being pitched to consumers yet -- but heavy traffic already appears to be forming. Web cartoonist Matthew Inman loves his Tesla. But like many proud EV owners and proponents, does he even realize his "Magical Space Car" runs on fossil fuels? Following up tech giants like Google and Uber as well as automotive wunderkind Tesla, car industry stalwart Ford is moving full steam ahead with an autonomous vehicle of its own. Announced amid the Michigan-based corporation's fifth annual trend conference "Further with Ford" in Silicon Valley this week, the car maker revealed it is moving its autonomous driving technology research plans upward to a full-scale advanced engineering program.

EagleEye says its tech gives drones military-grade security and the possibility of flying autonomous missions. In 2014, three software engineers decided to create a drone company in Wavre, Belgium, just outside Brussels. All were licensed pilots and trained in NATO security techniques. But rather than build drones themselves, they decided they would upgrade existing radio-controlled civilian drones with an ultra-secure software layer to allow the devices to fly autonomously. Their company, EagleEye Systems, would manufacture the onboard computer and design the software, while existing manufacturers would provide the drone body and sensors.

Collectively, those food stuffs might not sound like the most obvious combination of ingredients to satiate one's palette. Yet it turns out they do work together in a satisfying enough manner, at least for some taste buds. Chef Watson, that's who, or rather, what -- if you want to get technical about it. The Chef hat is just one application gaining more mainstream attraction for IBM Watson, a ground-breaking cognitive system so far more synonymous with ambitions for revolutionizing healthcare and education rather than anything as basic as kitchen recipes. Watson stepped into the national spotlight in 2011 with its winning performance on the decades-old TV game show Jeopardy as an artificially intelligent computer able to recognize and respond to questions posed in natural language rather than tech speak or code.

You can already control your mobile devices with touch, gesture, or voice commands. Now Finnish researcher Olli Lahdenoja is introducing another mechanism: facial recognition. Lahdenoja, a researcher at the University of Turku, has published a doctoral dissertation which develops a facial recognition method that can fit onto a single electronic chip. The system has the potential to be used in devices such as smartwatches, as well as mobile handsets, thanks to its compact size and low power consumption. "[Using this system] a smartwatch could, for example, switch on when a user looks at it. What's more, the recognition system could be used to identify a person when they access an online service," says Lahdenoja.