Hot on the heels of Google's robot cars, a team of German researchers at AutoNOMOS Labs in Berlin's Free University have upped the ante and unveiled the driverless taxi. Imagine never arguing about the most efficient route or mentally debating the merits of tipping a driver whose ineptitude at the wheel almost killed you. Made in Germany (MIG) is an autonomous Volkswagen Passat cab you hail using an iPad app, and it eliminates the most unappealing aspect of taxis: the driver. MIG is equipped with GPS navigation, video cameras, laser scanners, sensors and radars that it uses to construct a 3D map of its surroundings. It uses this map to detect pedestrians and other vehicles as it navigates the road. To hail MIG, passengers use an iPad that transmits its GPS location to the vehicle and tells the taxi where to pick them up.

Ray Solomonoff, a physicist who was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, died on Dec. 7 in Boston. He was 83 and had homes in New Ipswich, N.H., and Cambridge, Mass. The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm, said his wife, Grace. As a child Mr. Solomonoff developed what would become a lifelong passion for mathematical theorems, and as a teenager he became captivated with idea of creating machines that could learn and ultimately think. In 1952 he met Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist who was also exploring the idea of machine learning, and John McCarthy, a young mathematician.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.

Published in the June 2000 issue of Computers and Society.

Clearly, the second approach is more cautious. Intuitively, it demands that there is a specific argument for τ that is contained in each rational stance a reasoner can take given Γ, DRules, and SRules. The first option doesn't bind the acceptability of τ to a specific argument: it is sufficient if according to each rational stance there is some argument for τ. In Default Logic, the main representational tool is that of a default rule, or simply a default.

Research carried out at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid in collaboration with the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas employed computational techniques to improve the characterization of proteins. The system they developed has allowed them to predict, for example, the relationship between two human proteins and telomeres, which led to their possible implication in cellular aging and the development of cancer; this awaits experimental verification. Proteins are molecules that are formed by chains of amino acids and they play a fundamental role in all of life, given that they contain the coded information in genes; they, therefore, carry out numerous functions in an organism: immunological (antibodies), structural (they constitute the majority of cellular material), bioregulating (they form part of enzymes) and a long list of etceteras. In short, they regulate thousands of process that take place within all organisms, including inside the human organism, and they frequently do so by means of relationships they establish with other cells. "Analyzing and using this network of interactions is a very interesting task due to the large number of associations that exist and to the multiple forms in which one protein can influence the function of others," explains Professor Beatriz García, of UC3M's Computer Science department.

Brooks, R.A, "Kunstliche Intelligenz und Roboter-Entwicklung (translation: Artificial Intelligence and Robot Development"), Proceedings of the Heinz Nixdorf Museum Paderborn Podium- Computer Gehirn: Was kann der Mensch? Was Konnen die Computer?, Ferdinand Shoningh Press, October, 2001, pp. Brooks, R.A. and Charles Rosenberg, "L –A Common Lisp for Embedded Systems", Association of Lisp Users Meeting and Workshop LUV'95, August, 1995. Brooks, R. A., "Challenges for Complete Creature Architectures", First International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Paris, France, September 1990, pp. 434–443. Mataric, M. J. and R. A. Brooks, "Learning a Distributed Map Representation Based on Navigation Behaviors", Japan–USA Symposium on Flexible Automation, Kyoto, Japan, July 1990, pp. 499–506.

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich. These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT. 'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it.

It's not a vulture or crow but a Falcon--a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff's office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon's potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone's flickering images of a nearby highway. Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds.

This is the full version of the paper Scott Rettberg presented for me at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, on August 20, 2004. I slightly abbreviated the text he read so it would fit in the alloted time. The text that I sumitted to ISEA was abbreviated further so as to not exceed the (believe it or not) 13250 character limit. As I started researching this topic, I gave a preliminary talk at the History of Material Texts workshop; that text is online. If you'd like to correspond about the topic and correct or inform me about the use of print-based interfaces, please contact me: nickm at this domain.