Out on the rocky horizon, the robot has stopped dead in its tracks. "Uh, Dave, I got a big problem out here," a voice crackles over the radio. "OK," David Wettergreen replies carefully, peering off in the direction of the machine. "Big" turns out to be a new part for the robot that doesn't quite fit and so prevents the robot's cameras--its eyes--from turning properly. Back at the laboratory, this would be a quick fix, but the robot, Wettergreen, three geologists, two software engineers, two sociologists, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a biologist are all out in the middle of Chile's vast Atacama Desert, [see map] many hours' drive from civilization. As he strides off to investigate, you get the sense Wettergreen's enjoying himself. For the better part of an hour, he and two colleagues will wrestle with the aberrant part [see photo, " All in a Day's Work"].

THERE's been a minor car crunch on a city street in Brazil, and the two drivers are screaming and gesticulating, arguing angrily over who's to blame and who should pay for the damage. Instant justice has arrived, cyber-style. The laptop runs an artificial-intelligence program called the Electronic Judge, and its job is to help the human judge on the team swiftly and methodically dispense justice according to witness reports and forensic evidence at the scene of an incident. It can issue on-the-spot fines, order damages to be paid and even recommend jail sentences. The software is being tested by three judges in the state of Espirito Santo.

WASHINGTON – When robots play soccer, it looks like a game played by 5-year-olds: they swarm around the ball, kick haphazardly and fall down a lot. However, robot teams have made strides in recent years, and some researchers believe the humanoids could challenge the world's best players in a decade or two. "Maybe in 20 years we could develop a team of robots to play against the best World Cup teams," said Daniel Lee, who heads the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab, which is seeking a fourth consecutive RoboCup in Brazil this month, the premiere event for robotic soccer. Robotic soccer, says Lee, is more than fun and games. It involves artificial intelligence and complex algorithms that help provide a better understanding of human vision, cognition and mobility.

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.

Brazil's World Cup may be in full swing, but teams of robotic players are busy warming up to be in with a chance of lifting another trophy. The mechanical teams are set to battle it out on the pitch in a less well-known football tournament also taking place in Brazil this summer. A group of five humanoid'Drake' robots will compete as a team at the RoboCup 2014, which kicks off in Joao Pessoa on 21 July. RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1997. It aims to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research.

Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. "The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types" explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as "Diffbot Mike," and "Diffbot can identify them all." Diffbot knows the difference between a social network profile, a blog post, a site's front page, a product page, an event page and dozens more. Today, Diffbot is releasing its first set of APIs, now open to all developers for free. The launch has the potential to dramatically impact the types of applications developers can build, and for consumers, it means a whole host of intelligent applications are about to emerge.

I really need him back on the blog. We first wrote about Roombots three years ago, and back then the researchers at the EPFL Biorobotics Lab, led by Professor Auke Ijspeert, were just getting started with their self-assembling robotic furniture. Now the researchers have some real robots to show off. As Ijspeert himself puts it, this is a "crazy project" to create adaptive furniture that can change shape and functionality and even move around. His group has built robotic modules that can attach to one another and use onboard motors to change their shape.

The cyborg armies of the future just got one step closer to total domination. Probably by taking a break from building giant fighting robots, scientists at the University of Tokyo have created the RatCar, a wheeled contraption controlled by a rat's brain. The researchers wanted to prove a simple idea right: that animals could use the parts of their brains that control limbs to control a vehicle. It looks like they can. The goal of the research was to see if it might eventually be feasible for paralyzed people to control wheelchairs using brain implants.

A list of transactions from a grocery store is shown in the figure above. Frequent items are a list of items that commonly appear together. One example is {wine, diapers, soy milk}. From the data set we can also find an association rule such as diapers - wine. This means that if someone buys diapers, there is a good chance they will buy wine. With the frequent item sets and association rules retailers have a much better understanding of their customers. Although common examples of association rulea are from the retail industry, it can be applied to a number of other categories, such as web site traffic, medicine, etc. How do we define these so called relationships? Who defines what is interesting? When we are looking for frequent item sets or association rules, we must look two parameters that defines its relevance. The support of an itemset, which is defined as the percentage of the data set which containts this itemset.