It's the holy grail of translation, a goal one researcher has called "more complex than building an atomic bomb." Smooth, immediate translations between people speaking different languages would be a remarkable achievement of enormous economic and cultural benefit. Some suggest that it won't happen until computers can express true artificial intelligence - something like C-3PO of "Star Wars" fame, whose knowledge extends far beyond mere vocabulary to an understanding of customs and cultures. Still, researchers are chipping away at the problem. Universal translation is one of 10 emerging technologies that will affect our lives and work "in revolutionary ways" within a decade, Technology Review says.

Cue the John Williams theme and roll the vanishing intro – Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi-training droids have arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). Or at least David Miller's versions have arrived. The free-floating spheres are set to test new concepts for "smart" satellites. Able to fly in precision formation, the robots may one day hold the key to building everything from huge space telescopes that can peer deeply into the universe to constellations of small, cheap satellites that can monitor changes on Earth. The shuttle Discovery last week brought the second of three droids that are undergoing experiments as they arrive.

In a decade or so, people may not have to tidy their house, clean up after the dog, or even nag their spouse to do chores. A friendly, human-like robot will take care of routine tasks, and it won't whine or fight back. If technologists' predictions bear out, this second coming of robots could be more pervasive than the first in the '60s, when industrial robots revolutionized manufacturing. Designed to mimic the look and gestures of humans, the new breed of personal robots eventually may have artificial skin and muscles, as well as eye and facial expressions, and they might speak more naturally. But for this rapidly evolving field to take off, scientists will have to improve the quality and reliability of electronics first, and companies will have to find the application that every household must have.

"Tracking Mean Shift Clustered Point Clouds for 3D Surveillance", and "Multiview Fusion for Canonical View Generation based on Homography Constraints" ACM Mulimedia Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, October 2006.

In a 1977 article, the late AI pioneer Allen Newell foresaw a time when the entire man-made world would be permeated by systems that cushioned us from dangers and increased our abilities: smart vehicles, roads, bridges, homes, offices, appliances, even clothes. Systems built around AI components will increasingly monitor financial transactions, predict physical phenomena and economic trends, control regional transportation systems, and plan military and industrial operations. Basic research on common sense reasoning, representing knowledge, perception, learning, and planning is advancing rapidly, and will lead to smarter versions of current applications and to entirely new applications. As computers become ever cheaper, smaller, and more powerful, AI capabilities will spread into nearly all industrial, governmental, and consumer applications. Moreover, AI has a long history of producing valuable spin-off technologies.

A proposed standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies, drawing together ideas from Web languages (e.g., XML, RDF), Description Logics, and frame-based systems. OKBC - The Open Knowledge Base Connectivity Protocol (formerly called GFP, the Generic Frame Protocol). OK Station (in French) - The Ontological Knowledge Station, a commercial modeling tool dedicated to the acquisition, definition and manipulation of knowledge bases and ontologies, based on the OK ontological model (Univ Savoie, France). OMCSNet - A semantic network derived from the OpenMind commonsense database, now superceded by the more recent OpenMind derivative knowledge base ConceptNet. ON9 - The ontology library at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (Italy), developed using the ONIONS methodology and implemented in Loom.

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout and silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the doctor really did or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with a voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth (Butler 1998).

Examples include creating systems which respond in an emotionally-aware way to the user, systems which modify their behaviour in response to affective cues, et cetera. Examples include how emotion might be added to virtual environments, the effect of affect on computer-mediated learning environments or collaborative computer games. Examples include attempts to add emotions to AI-systems, attempts to simulate emotions in computers, systems that are inspired by the physiological basis of emotion, studies which aim to understand the role that affective processes play in reasoning, and computational slants on theories of emotion. In particular studies which use computer simulation to understand affective processes. Examples include creating systems which respond in an emotionally-aware way to the user, systems which modify their behaviour in response to affective cues, et cetera.

Bridge Baron is a computer program that plays bridge. It won the 1997 world championship of computer bridge, the Baron Barclay World Bridge Computer Challenge, as reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The five-day competition, which was hosted by the American Contract Bridge League in July 1997, included five computer programs, from the US, Japan, and Germany. The Bridge Baron won every head-to-head match that it played against the other programs.

Generalized Thermography: A new approach to evaluation in computer Go. First published in Iida, H. (Ed.), Proceedings IJCAI-97 Workshop on Using Games as an Experimental Testbed for AI Research, pages 41-49, Nagoya, 1997.