Could we fall in love with robots? Movies have been suggesting the possibility for some time, from a man falling in love with his computer operating system in the 2013 film Her, to robot lover Gigolo Joe offering his services to women in 2001's A.I. We are on the cusp of creating loveable robots. Leaps in artificial intelligence are making conversations with automatons less stilted, for example. One Silicon Valley company, Eternime, plans to let people create avatars of themselves that learn their speech patterns and life stories, then converse with loved ones after death. And robots themselves are becoming increasingly lifelike.

Steven Pinker, the Canadian experimental psychologist and author, presents a friendly front. A receptionist in the Harvard psychology department where he teaches describes him as "gentle". And amid the high-strung Harvard world of academic divas and their curt assistants, he is unusual in arranging his own interviews, and warmly welcomes visitors to his loft apartment in Boston. Yet in print, Pinker, 58, who shot to stardom 18 years ago with his first bestseller, The Language Instinct, has not hesitated to attack what he considers to be decades of prevailing views by arguing that human nature is not shaped by culture but is a function of brain design and natural selection. "Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. The human mind is not a blank slate," says Pinker, who wrote a book with the same title, and has played a key role in adding evolutionary theory to the study of our mental life, from emotions to decision-making and how we acquire language.

In warehouses, hospitals and retail stores, and on city streets, industrial parks and the footpaths of college campuses, the first representatives of this new invading force are starting to become apparent. "The robots are among us," says Steve Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley investor and a director at Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX companies, which have relied heavily on robotics. A multitude of machines will follow, he says: "A lot of people are going to come in contact with robots in the next two to five years." The arrival of the robots -- and their potentially devastating effect on human employment -- has been widely predicted. Now, the machines are starting to roll or walk out of the labs.

Many of us have ideas and dreams, which we hope may translate into commercial success. Increasingly, we turn to patent protection to safeguard the products of our ingenuity. Patents cover any new, useful and unobvious invention. Amazon's 1-Click checkout system, Viagra, the telephone, the lightbulb, Windows software, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, a novel windsurf board, Lego toy bricks, the artificial heart, cat's eye road reflectors, the computer mouse, and a unique cut of a diamond are all examples of past or current patents filed worldwide. Patents are global and cover hundreds of thousands of products and processes you may encounter in daily life, including some types of prescription pills, flatscreen televisions, windscreen wipers, pacemakers, satellite systems, plastic products.

If economists are to be believed, vast numbers of jobs will have evaporated by the time today's pupils reach the labour market. Oxford university's Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say almost half of the jobs in the US are at high risk from computerisation in the next two decades, together with two-thirds of those in India and three-quarters in China. While workers worry about whether robots will take their jobs, teachers are wondering how to use education to insulate the next generation from such a fate. When the last wave of automation swept the developed world at the start of the 20th century, policymakers decided education was the answer. If machines were going to substitute for brawn, they reasoned, more people would need to use their brains.

Who will build the self-driving car of the future? Fired-up by Google's driverless prototype, carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads. But the advanced sensors and electronics that form the building blocks of self-driving cars are often made by suppliers, not the car manufacturer. "It's all the suppliers into the industry who, in the fullness of time, will gain the power," says a senior industry analyst, who works closely with the leading carmakers. Carmakers have been gradually adding autonomous elements to their vehicles since Jaguar introduced adaptive cruise control in its XK sports car in 1996.

Northwestern University Application: CogSketch People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. The goal of the CogSketch project is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, is being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), a National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center. The vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today.

It's getting to be a busy time for Brighterion, the fraud prevention engine at the heart of Worldwide and of Worldpay, the largest card acquirer in Europe. The company says there is a "huge business need for inexpensive, adaptable, real-time, cross-channel fraud detection and prevention solutions. However, most existing solutions are built on antiquated technologies such as business rules, neural networks, data mining and statistics. Decision trees are stagnant while fraud schemes continue to evolve." Its relationship with MasterCard began in 2004 when the card company, dissatisfied with its fraud prevention system for detecting too few frauds and creating too many false positives -- denying a purchase to a legitimate customer with a valid credit card -- invited software companies to show what they would do with two years of anonymized MasterCard data.

Password theft is an ongoing problem. Finger print and voice recognition is still years away. What's a bank to do if it wants to verify the thousands of customers using its mobile app? One way is their behavior -- or at least their typing behavior. Banks in Europe's Nordic region have begun rolling out a new kind of security technology for their mobile apps that tracks the pressure and speed of how customers type a pin number into their smartphones.

Academia is supposed to be a place where creative types can be free, and with that freedom accomplish great things, whether it be new art, breakthrough treatises, scientific discoveries, or feats of engineering. But academia isn't what it used to be, and to provide some insights into some of its problems, I compared notes with friend and former colleague, Nick Cassimatis, who is associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer. In our own ways, he and I have found severe limitations in academia today, limitations that led to my leaving academia to co-found a research institute, 2AI to be funded by intellectual property, and that led Nick to start his own company outside academia, SkyPhrase in order to achieve his ambitions in artificial intelligence. Nick's romantic ambitions started early – he began research into artificial intelligence and natural language at the precocious age of fifteen, and wrote a French-to-English translation program that helped put him on the Top-20 High School Students List by USA Today. More than simply artificial intelligence, his aim is to understand human-level intelligence, and how it can come about via many unintelligent parts.