Today's computer processors and displays will also support tele-immersive environments. Handling and transporting all that time-sensitive data, however, is still a stretch for ordinary desktop operating systems and the Internet. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley have developed software, dubbed Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody (TEEVE), that aims to bridge this gap. The system captures and coordinates video streams from three or more sets of four cameras, each of which generates a stream of three-dimensional video data. The system generates macro video frames made up of the frames from all of the cameras at one time interval, and sends them over a network in a way that evenly distributes the data so that it does not overload the network.

Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone. "I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand. The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

As museums worldwide strive to draw in young people, Tate Britain could place itself at the cutting edge with a project for Internet viewers to drive robots around its galleries at weekends, shining lights and cameras on artworks that loom out of the dark. The robot idea is one of four finalists for the new Tate IK Prize. The winning project will become a reality by the summer. "We wanted ways to use technology to increase our audience reach and new ways to connect people with art," said Jane Burton, the Tate's head of creative content. Another finalist proposes reproducing the gallery as a version of the popular Minecraft videogame.

Helen Greiner, of US company iRobot Corp, is here promoting a carpet cleaning robot. They're small, unobstrusive, and seem happy to do a job few if any of us enjoy. Such is the appeal of iRobot Corporation's vacuum cleaner known as Roomba that the Massachusetts-based company has already sold more than a million of them in the US. Some, says iRobot chairwoman Helen Greiner, have been named. "Rosie is a highly popular (name) and so is Abby or Agnes," Ms Greiner says.

Winners of an AI-judged beauty contest, which displayed bias against non-white faces. AI has seen a renaissance over the last year, with developments in driverless vehicle technology, voice recognition, and the mastery of the game "Go," revealing how much machines are capable of. But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system.

In the late sixties while working at Ericsson he invented both sequence diagrams and use cases, and in later years worked on the SDL, UML and the RUP. We caught up with Dr Ivar Jacobson to hear his thoughts on where the industry is today, and where it will head in the future. Builder AU: What do you think of the state of software engineering today? Ivar Jacobson: What I see when I travel and talk to customers, participate in conferences and have discussions with experts around the world is that software development is very much still an immature discipline. We still rely on too much old work. Personally I am convinced we will change that dramatically, but it is a very slow process. I have been working on process improvement and new technologies for many years now, starting with component based development and then adding to that object orientation and now aspect orientation. I've been involved with new technology since the sixties, and I've been more optimistic than most -- it's my nature, but we are still struggling with basic stuff for many reasons.

In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha. Samantha lies far beyond the faux "artificial intelligence" of Google Now or Siri: she is as fully and unambiguously conscious as any human. The film's director and writer, Spike Jonze, employs this premise for limited and prosaic ends, so the film limps along in an uncanny valley, neither believable as near-future reality nor philosophically daring enough to merit suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Her raises questions about how humans might relate to computers. Twombly is suffering a painful separation from his wife; can Samantha make him feel better?

Manufacturing, finance, and the communications industry have in the last decade all come to rely upon artificial intelligence. But there's one industry that continues to put up resistance: the legal profession. The idea of a machine making legal decisions was long considered by opponents to be dangerous and ethically untenable. That's about to change, says John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Zeleznikow believes AI is about to improve people's access to justice and massively reduce the costs of running legal services.

Siri was not the first speech recognition application to grace our phones, but its success will help increase expectations for more artificial intelligence in business. Siri combines speech recognition and natural language processing with artificial intelligence and search algorithms in the cloud to behave like an intelligent human assistant. It stops short of predicting, but it sounds like it does. Even more predictive technologies are starting to be applied to business applications to help us wade through the seemingly unsurmountable volume of data compounding every day. Edith Cowan University in Perth is using a predictive model developed by IBM to identify students at risk of leaving a course before they finish.