Facebook is offering some more hints at its virtual reality and artificial intelligence ambitions with the grand opening of a new office in Paris dedicated to AI innovation. The program, dubbed Facebook AI Research (FAIR), will be tasked with long-term research projects on image recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition. In line with Facebook's method of homegrown infrastructure, the AI team will also be responsible for building out the back-end pipelines for funneling all of that data. The end goal is to produce new channels for displaying Facebook's core features: News Feed, search and photos. To get started, Facebook signed a collaborative agreement with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (abbreviated in French to "INRIA").

A while back I wrote a 500-word piece looking at essential science fiction (SF) for the IT pro, following up a review I wrote of David Brin's novel Existence. Part of that piece was an on-going personal project, a list I've been referring to on Twitter as "the essential futurist SF list". With summer finally here, it seems the right time to publish some of that list, so I've collated below 26 of what I consider the most essential SF titles for people interested in imagining all possibilities for the future. Think of it as a summer reading list that's a gateway to building tomorrow - all over your cold beverage of choice. It's a fascinating book, and deeply prescient - especially when you consider it was written in 1981.

A huge amount of information is stored or communicated in the form of natural language. But it is difficult to make use of this information without asking people to read or listen it all. In our European research centre in Grenoble (France), we teach computers to read, understand and act. Our research in natural language processing (NLP) makes this information accessible, but also comprehensible, integrated, and actionable. Our algorithms and models are used in text analytics applications for healthcare, litigation, automation and finance.

Robotics is a broad discipline with commercial applications spanning manufacturing, defense, space, entertainment, education and service. The robotics market is approximately $10B but growing rapidly. This study assessed the international state-of-the-art in robotics science, technology and practice. It identifies the significant accomplishments in robotics research, the potential for growth in this emerging industry, and the relative emphasis on different areas across the world. It included analysis of various R&D programs, funding mechanisms and strategic growth directions. This report covers industrial robots, service and personal robots, robotic vehicles, humanoids, space robots, robots used in biological and medical applications and networks of cooperating robots.

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram's 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that--if it panned out--would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain--from synapses to hemispheres--and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. In the four years since Markram's speech, he hasn't backed off a nanometer. The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety--from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness--is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them.

What the real monkey thinks, the virtual monkey does.

One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it's possible to imagine a machine making the grade. Turing was one of the 20th century's great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent. Artificial intelligences are now ubiquitous, from GPS navigation systems and Google algorithms to automated customer service and Apple's Siri, to say nothing of Deep Blue and Watson -- but no machine has met Turing's standard.

IBM has unveiled an experimental chip that borrows tricks from brains to power a cognitive computer, a machine able to learn from and adapt to its environment. Reactions to the computer giant's press release about SyNAPSE, short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronic, have ranged from conservative to zany. Some even claim it's IBM's attempt to recreate a cat brain from silicon. "Each neuron in the brain is a processor and memory, and part of a social network, but that's where the brain analogy ends. We're not trying to simulate a brain," said IBM spokeswoman Kelly Sims.

Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram. To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons. This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton -- "I got very excited about that idea," he remembers.

If you've been to the RoboGames, you've seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball -- or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact. The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain.