A fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles will co-operate with a ground robot on surveillance tasks in the Australian Outback, in trials to be held next year by BAE Systems. The series of trials are being organised by researchers at the company's Advanced Technology Centre (ATC), to demonstrate its autonomous systems, data fusion and artificial intelligence technologies. The first of the trials, to be held next month with funding from the MoD, will see the team fly the fleet of small UAV research vehicles, fitted with a number of sensors, in a data-gathering exercise. This information will be used to develop algorithms to allow the UAVs to co-operate with each other and act in response to information gathered by aerial and ground sensors, in a trial to be held later in the year. This trial will in turn be followed by another demonstration towards the end of 2005, in which the UAVs will communicate and co-operate with a robot on the ground, said Dr Phil Greenway, head of advanced information processing at the ATC at Filton near Bristol.

The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles--and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNN in 2011. "It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices." Which sounds nice, but doesn't necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.

The have been genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins (Jesper Pedersen). For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these are exciting times for "executable biology," an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert's Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. To do so, they had to compile information from 900 scientific publications.

Janet Eden-Harris is CEO of Umbria (www.umbrialistens.com), We spoke to Janet about how the firm is using online opinions and information to help provide information to companies about their brands and products. Techrockies: Tell us a bit about Umbria--what's the idea behind the service? Janet Eden-Harris: Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes the unaided opinions, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the online world (comprised of blogs, message boards, Usenet, product review sites, etc.) and distills it into actionable insights about companies, brands, products, people and issues. The insight gathered by Umbria is then offered to some of the world's leading brands, including Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, Wild Oats and many others.

In the late sixties while working at Ericsson he invented both sequence diagrams and use cases, and in later years worked on the SDL, UML and the RUP. We caught up with Dr Ivar Jacobson to hear his thoughts on where the industry is today, and where it will head in the future. Builder AU: What do you think of the state of software engineering today? Ivar Jacobson: What I see when I travel and talk to customers, participate in conferences and have discussions with experts around the world is that software development is very much still an immature discipline. We still rely on too much old work. Personally I am convinced we will change that dramatically, but it is a very slow process. I have been working on process improvement and new technologies for many years now, starting with component based development and then adding to that object orientation and now aspect orientation. I've been involved with new technology since the sixties, and I've been more optimistic than most -- it's my nature, but we are still struggling with basic stuff for many reasons.

People in technology know there's more and more data being created, but artificial intelligence startup Numenta is tackling a slightly different problem: the speed at which data is produced. The Silicon Valley company, founded by mobile computing pioneer Jeff Hawkins, last week said energy-efficiency company EnerNoc is among a small group of businesses now testing its software. Its product, called Grok, is designed to process data to yield some sort of prediction or insight. The software is modeled on how the human brain processes data and is particularly well suited for handling streams of information, such as data from a sensor on regular intervals, the company says. EnerNoc is using Grok to earn more revenue from its demand response customers who agree to reduce electricity. Grid operators pay EnerNoc for aggregating many of these energy reductions at buildings to maintain a steady grid frequency.

"Maggie is a very smart monkey," says Tim Buschman, a graduate student in Professor Earl Miller's neuroscience lab. Maggie isn't visible – she's in a biosafety enclosure meant to protect her from human germs – but the signs of her intelligence flow over two monitors in front of Buschman. For the last seven years, Maggie has "worked" for MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). Three hours a day, the macaque plays computer games that (usually) are designed to require her to generate abstract representations and then use those abstractions as tools. "Even I have trouble with this one," Buschman says, nodding at a game that involves classifying logical operations. But Maggie is on a roll, slamming through problems, taking about half a second for each and getting about four out of five right.

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated. At the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see "A Transformer Wins DARPA's $2 Million Robotics Challenge"). Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings. "I think this is an opportunity for everybody to see how hard robotics really is," says Mark Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, now owned by Google, which produced an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot called Atlas (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agile Robots").

A philosopher is perhaps the last person you'd expect to have a hand in designing your next car, but that's exactly what one expert on self-driving vehicles has in mind. Chris Gerdes, a professor at Stanford University, leads a research lab that is experimenting with sophisticated hardware and software for automated driving. But together with Patrick Lin, a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly, he is also exploring the ethical dilemmas that may arise when vehicle self-driving is deployed in the real world. Gerdes and Lin organized a workshop at Stanford earlier this year that brought together philosophers and engineers to discuss the issue. They implemented different ethical settings in the software that controls automated vehicles and then tested the code in simulations and even in real vehicles.

Few people ever need to deal with a stricken nuclear reactor, but that skill could turn out to be important for the evolution of smarter robots. In Pomona, California, this week, 25 of the world's most advanced humanoid robots will take part in a contest inspired by the challenge of stabilizing a nuclear reactor that's leaking dangerous radioactive material. Teams from universities across the U.S., as well as Japan, China, and Europe, are bringing robots that will try to walk across piles of rubble, climb ladders, operate power tools, and drive buggies, among other chores. Each challenge is inspired by something that might have helped stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan after it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011. Considerable academic kudos will go to whichever team completes the most tasks within the allotted time by the end of the contest.