Science fiction luminary Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics mandated safety measures to limit artificial intelligence in robots, protecting humans from harm. That was 70 years ago. Largely written for fantasy books. Nowadays, researchers have developed artificial synapses, computers have won jeopardy and Google's computer can do something called supervised learning. With the robotics industry saying household robots will be the new PCs in ten years, the impact of robotic AI on humanity is no longer tomorrow's problem.

When Steve Grand developed his artificial-life computer game Creatures nine years ago, he never dreamed that 1 million people would play it and come to care deeply about the lives of their virtual pets. Creatures allowed players to design these pets, or norns, and observe how they interacted with their environment and with other norns. The norns have computer-simulated hormones and DNA. According to Grand's book "Creation: Life and How to Make it," "Creatures was probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years." That's a pretty startling claim, but as Grand explains in his strangely accessible and consistently surprising book, whether or not you believe it depends on your definition of what's alive. Grand -- now two years into building a 4-month-old robot orangutan named Lucy -- argues that our traditional notion of life is just now beginning to change. Grand spoke to Salon from his home outside of Bristol, England (where he works out of his garage), about what artificial life says about the soul, why emotions are so important to intelligence and why someday we might drive cars that enjoy doing their work. I was a college dropout but I trained to be a primary school teacher. I was really lazy at it and hated standing up in front of people and speaking. But the reason I got into teaching was not really because I was interested in teaching but because I was interested in children's minds and how people grow and develop. Yes, this was the '70s when I was at college.

Henry E. Kyburg Jr., a renowned and respected professor of philosophy and computer science at the University of Rochester, died of acute pancreatitis Oct. 30 at the age of 79 at Strong Memorial Hospital. He was well-known for his cutting-edge studies of uncertain inference, which is the human process of reaching conclusions, and data mining, the process by which computers search for information in data or draw conclusions from it. Kyburg, Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, was honored in 2007 with the University Award for Lifetime Achievement in Graduate Education. He was clearly admired by his students--who can be found working as pioneers themselves across all disciplines at research and educational institutions--for his insightful instruction, generous spirit, and relentless energy. "The last thing he said to me was'I would like a logic problem to work on,' because Henry was always scribbling, loved his work, and in general never stayed idle," said his wife Sarah Kyburg, who lived with her husband and eight children on their sustainable farm in Lyons, N.Y.

Stanovov speaks about a speech-controlled wheelchair, which seeks to provide people that are quadriplegic, that is people with partial or total loss of use of their limbs and torso, with the possibility to control their wheelchairs through voice commands. In this interview Stanovov discusses the basic parts of the speech-controlled wheelchair, the fuzzy controller he created, and the trials they had in the medical center.

Our first presentation will be given by Susan Greenfield. Baroness Susan Greenfield, was once both an undergraduate and a post-graduate at Oxford, and is now Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. As well as her life's work in neuroscience, and particularly in methods for preventing the brain-cell death that happens in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's - work that has led to a university spin- out company specialising in novel approaches to neurodegeneration - Susan has an interest in the neural basis of consciousness. This is described in her books, which include'Journey to the Centres of the Mind: Toward a Science of Consciousness', and'Private Life of the Brain', and is what she will talk about on Monday 26th January.

For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls. A new Cornell study suggests language use is simpler than they had thought. Co-author Morten Christiansen, Cornell professor of psychology and co-director of the Cornell Cognitive Science Program, and his colleagues say that language is actually based on simpler sequential structures, like clusters of beads on a string. "What we're suggesting is that the language system deals with words by grouping them into little clumps that are then associated with meaning," he said. Sentences are made up of such word clumps, or "constructions," that are understood when arranged in a particular order. For example, the word sequence "bread and butter" might be represented as a construction, whereas the reverse sequence of words ("butter and bread") would likely not.

Distinct patterns of activity--which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face--even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward. The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights into care giving behavior, but also in cases of child neglect or abuse. "These adults have no children of their own. Yet images of a baby's face triggered what we think might be a deeply embedded response to reach out and care for that child," said senior author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that collaborated on the study.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence has captured our collective imagination for decades. Can behaviour that we think of as intelligent be replicated in a machine? If so, what consequences could this have for society? And what does it tell us about ourselves as human beings? Besides being a topic in science fiction and popular philosophy, AI is also a well-established area of scientific research.

Global Speech Recognition Market is expected to grow with market size of US $13 billion by 2022. Growing mobile banking application and adoption of mobile- and cloud-based computer technology is driving the Speech Recognition Market. The growing adoption of automated and smart applications in consumer electronics and healthcare industries act as the major contributor for the growth of the speech recognition market during the forecasted period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 50 market data tables and figures spread over 110 numbers of pages of the project report. Market Research Future has predicted that this market will be dominated by North America throughout the forecast period.

The Pacific Rim International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) was initiated in Japan in 1990, to create an artificial intelligence (AI) conference which would promote collaborative exploitation of AI in the Pacific Rim nations. The conference has grown, both in participation and scope, and now includes participation from all major Pacific Rim nations.