This spring, Livorno (Italy) will host the second Soft Robotics Week (April 25-30, 2016), an exciting week totally dedicated to Soft Robotics, featuring a unique concentration of several scientific, cultural and educational events and the RoboSoft Grand Challenge. International experts across multiple fields in the scientific community of soft robotics, industrial leaders, young researchers and students, will meet together to discuss current trends and applications for soft robots and their prospects for the future.

Computer AI has long been defeating humans in the game of chess, and earlier this year Google's AlphaGo became the first to beat a world champion in the ancient Chinese board game Go, but now it's time to settle the score in a game that really matters: a classic FPS. That's what a group of AI researchers hope to see, with a new challenge inviting computers to face-off in Doom, but playing as humans would. The "Visual AI Doom Competition" will be hosted by the 2016 Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference later this year, and now the group is accepting applications to find the best bots that can play a round of deathmatch against each other using the same learning techniques as a human. But this isn't the same kind of AI used for enemies when you play a game against bots. No, this kind of computer AI will not have all-encompassing knowledge of the game and its workings, instead it will have to rely only on what it "sees" as input.

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA – Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stared at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepared for takeoff. "Three, two, one … go!" the announcer hollered, and as the racers fixed their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whirred, rose and buzzed through the air. Some struggled to move, while others zipped confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard (9.1-meter) dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida on April 16. Organizers hope to make the event an annual intercollegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges.

This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine Speakers: Dr Carl Frey, James Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology Dr Michael Osborne, University Lecturer in Machine Learning, University of Oxford Will you one day lose your job to a robot, or even an algorithm? Dr Carl Frey and Dr Michael Osborne's recent working paper, 'The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?', found that nearly half of US jobs could be susceptible to computerisation over the next two decades. So as technology races ahead, will low-skilled workers need to retrain in order to remain part of the workforce?

Often they involve more than one. In December, Microsoft-owned Skype unveiled a demo version of a real-time translation service. As one caller speaks English or Spanish, the program renders it in the other language, in both spoken and written form. The U of T computer science department website hosts a version of a tool that many industry players are racing to perfect: upload a picture, and it generates a written caption. At a CIFAR talk in March, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, now a U of T professor, showed that the model is eerily accurate -- but not always.

Editor's Note: This article was originally printed in the 2008 Scientific American Special Report on Robots. It is being published on the Web as part of ScientificAmerican.com's In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology's rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies. Yet a closely related goal has remained stubbornly elusive. In stark contrast to the largely unanticipated explosion of computers into the mainstream, the entire endeavor of robotics has failed rather completely to live up to the predictions of the 1950s. In those days experts who were dazzled by the seemingly miraculous calculational ability of computers thought that if only the right software were written, computers could become the articial brains of sophisticated autonomous robots. Within a decade or two, they believed, such robots would be cleaning our oors, mowing our lawns and, in general, eliminating drudgery from our lives.

Artificial intelligence made short work of Go, a 3,000-year-old Chinese board game with more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe, so how it will fare taking on a video game classic like Doom? AI researchers are going to find out, and have announced a new challenge looking for computers that know how to handle a rocket launcher, with the best bots set to duke it out in a deathmatch later this year at the Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference. At first glance, this might sound like a walk in the park. After all, if you've ever played a first-person-shooter against computer enemies, you'll know they can be as fast and accurate as, well, a computer. But the bots you've played will have had access to the game's inner workings -- they're looking at the world like Neo in The Matrix, with perfect knowledge of maps, weapons, and the positions of other players. For the "Visual AI Doom Competition," artificially intelligent bots will only have the same information as a human: they'll see the screen in front of them, and nothing more. "There are all sorts of video games that humans play way better than computers."

It's fun to ponder a future filled with self-driving cars, a world with breezy commutes where robot navigators have made deadly crashes a thing of the past. But how far off is that future, really? Last month, Google suggested that this driverless utopia may actually be much further away than many people may realize. In a speech at SXSW in Austin, Google's car project director Chris Urmson explained that the day when fully autonomous vehicles are widely available, going anywhere that regular cars can, might be as much as 30 years away. There are still serious technical and safety challenges to overcome. In the near term, self-driving cars may be limited to more narrow situations and clearer weather.

Researchers in Nebraska tested a new tool on Friday that could eventually help in fighting grass fires -- drones. A team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln flew an unmanned aircraft over the prairie at the Homestead National Monument of America on Friday, dropping ping pong-like balls filled with a chemical mixture to ignite brush-clearing grass fires. Local and federal officials are interested in the technology because it could help clear overgrown vegetation in rugged, hard-to-reach terrain, said Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the National Park Service. The balls are filled with a chemical powder, potassium permanganate, before they're loaded into the drone. During flight, the aircraft pierces the ball with a needle and injects it with another chemical, glycol, before releasing it.

Editor's note: Digital Trends has partnered with WebVisions, the internationally recognized design, technology and user-experience conference, to help bring luminary Douglas Rushkoff to this year's event in Portland, Oregon. As part of our partnership, we're also pleased to feature select content from WebVisions' insightful blog, Word. This week, contributor Mark Wyner wonders how we go about teaching artificial intelligence right from wrong. Twitter has admitted that as many as 23 million (8.5 percent) of its user accounts are autonomous Twitterbots. Many are there to increase productivity, conduct research, or even have some fun.