Led by Founding Director Prof. Nick Bostrom, the Future of Humanity Institute is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. It enables a select set of leading intellects to bring the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects. The Future of Humanity Institute's mission is to shed light on crucial considerations for humanity's future. We seek to focus our work where we can make the greatest positive difference. Prof. Nick Bostrom's New York Times best seller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, provides an introduction to our work on the long-term implications of artificial intelligence. Please select your prefered mailing lists Newsletter Vacancies Partners' Vacancies

Meka is intended to design a robot that builds emotional links between humans and the machines themselves, and at the recent Intelligent Robots and Systems event, Professor Sentis of the University of Texas showed off Meka's most recent iteration. Unlike other androids, like the hyper-realistic Geminoid series, Meka's looks are deliberately non-realistic, right down to his glowing ears. Would that make you trust it more than a robot that's creepily realistic? This week the tech world has been blown-away by Siri, the (slightly) artificially-intelligent voice-activated assistant in Apple's new iPhone--particularly because the way Siri is programmed makes it able to understand natural language to a certain extent and even understand context, in a limited way. But Siri is nothing compared to the research of Osamu Hasegawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Dr Milne, who has already climbed Carstensz Pyramid (Oceania) Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America) and Aconcagua (South America), will be the first mountaineer to use the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system. The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks - not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies. IM-PACs' foundations in artificial intelligence planning technologies supply a framework that encourages a methodological approach to any task and allows users to transmit and respond to information in ways that can adapt to the circumstances the expedition team finds itself in. During his ascent, Dr. Milne will be in regular contact with colleagues in base camp who will monitor his progress against his ascent plan. A laptop computer and satellite phone will allow details of his current status and progress to be sent over the internet to a support team in Edinburgh.

Teamwork in humans is inspiring. Teamwork in highly-coordinated robots is a bit eerie. Created by artificial intelligence researcher Marco Dorigo of Belgium's Università Libre de Bruxelles, the "Swarmanoid" is a team of specialized robots designed to work together to solve environmental problems. The team is made up of three separate types of'bots: hand-bots, eye-bots and foot-bots, each of which serves a specific function. As you likely already guessed, the hand-bot is designed to grasp things and manipulate them, the eye-bot to see things and map out obstacles and the foot-bot provides locomotion.

In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoît Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. The agreement significantly enhances the scope and quality of Espacenet, the public patent information service on the EPO website, by adding an automatic translation tool. "With this agreement, Japan and the EPO have reached another milestone in their long-standing co‑operation to develop efficient structures and services in the international patent system", says EPO President Battistelli. "Making Japanese patents available in English not only brings a wealth of technological information to users in Europe and elsewhere. It also offers an effective and reliable way for engineers, inventors and scientists to take account of the latest Japanese technology when defining their intellectual property strategies, and thus improve the focus and quality of their own work."

It goes without saying that ASUS' first home robot, Zenbo, stole the show at this year's Computex. As soon as it rolled onto the stage during the keynote, everyone rushed to the front to get a good look at this cute little fella -- and that was before Chairman Jonney Shih shocked the audience with its surprisingly attractive low price of $599. Apart from its basic capabilities, little else was said about the machine, so we traveled all the way to ASUS' headquarters to meet Shih for a detailed demo. During the process, we managed to pry a little more info out of the exec, including what's inside this mysterious bot, the thinking behind its design and a target launch date around the holiday season. For a robot that's about a meter tall and can move its head, wheel around, recognize people and objects, and engage in voice interaction, $599 is almost too cheap.

I spent a reasonable portion of last year digging into neural networks and machine learning, wondering if and when computers were going to take my job. So when news broke of the "computer-generated musical" Beyond the Fence hitting London's West End, I was intrigued. After waiting for a couple of months, I headed to a performance of the show's limited run, but I left the theater unmoved. Computers can help write a musical, it seems, but they can't yet write a good one. "What if there was a wounded soldier who had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?" But before you can understand why it doesn't work and how the musical falls short, you need to understand how and why it was made.

Humanoids are supposed to be best suited for a world that's engineered for humans. They can climb stairs, open doors and drive cars. At DARPA Robotics Challenge, most of the participating humanoids succeeded in completing those tasks, but when it came to walking, they were clumsier than the species they were designed to emulate. Getting a machine to put one foot in front of the other has been a priority for roboticists for decades. Bipedal locomotion would presumably make it easier for robots to navigate a man-made world and perhaps make them more relatable.

Online-only supermarket Ocado is a household name in the UK, and some of you undoubtedly rely on the service to deliver your weekly shop. Something you're unlikely to be aware of, however, is Ocado's work in cutting-edge robotics research. A special division of the company looks at technology that'll ultimately benefit its grocery delivery business. And currently, that arm is involved in developing a robot that would make the most advanced automatons around right now look like Furbies. The SecondHands program aims to build a robot that'll effectively become an Ocado warehouse employee, aiding technicians that work in these mammoth sorting offices with equipment repair and all manner of other tasks.

You may remember Nao, a charming humanoid robot, for its exploits on the soccer field, dance floor, or even for its love of amateur dramatics. While Nao has enjoyed chatting with us humans since its maker Aldebaran Robotics added Nuance's speech recognition wizardry in 2011, the pair have today reaffirmed their desire to turn the droid into a true conversationalist. Upgraded cloud-based tech from Nuance will apparently "allow people to have truly natural conversations with the robot" in 19 different languages when the new models become available early next year. Furthermore, Nao has a fresh, distinct voice intended to better represent its "personality" -- one that's programmed never to tire of your trivial discussions. A demo of these new features can be seen below, although Nao mostly lets folks from Nuance and Aldebaran take the floor to talk of the partnership and the future of robot interaction.