Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking. Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory. "The greatest challenge for robots today is figuring out how to adapt to new situations," he says. "There are millions of robots out there, mostly in factories, and if everything is in the right place at the right time for them, they are superhuman in their precision, in their power, in their speed, in their ability to work repetitively 24/7 in hazardous environments--but if a bolt falls out of place, game over." This lack of adaptability "is the reason we don't have many robots in the home, which is much more unstructured than the factory," Lipson adds.

Google has announced this week that it will invest $1m in computer science research projects in Latin America within the next two to three years. Under the Google Research Awards in Latin America initiative, the search giant will grant one-year cash awards to universities to support the work of faculties and their full-time students. The project for the region will be run out of Google's Engineering Center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Areas of research Google will support within Computer Science, Engineering and related fields include geo/mapping technology, human-computer interaction as well as information retrieval, extraction and organization, privacy and immersive experiences. Ericsson taps Swedish academia and industry to dig up use cases that might make 5G compelling for operators to invest in.

A team of Airbus engineers are developing a self-flying taxi that is designed to fly above traffic to carry individual passengers and cargo throughout busy cities. The utopian vision is a bit far-fetched, but they plan to start testing a prototype of the vehicle in late 2017. The technical leader of Ford's autonomous car project speaks about what it's like to be driven by a driver-less car, and how big a deal self-driving vehicles will really be. In Airbus's corporate magazine FORUM, project executive Rodin Lyasoff asserts, "In as little as ten years, we could have projects on the market that revolutionize urban travel for millions of people." The project, dubbed Vahana, launched in February 2016 at A3, which is Airbus Group's innovation division based (where else?) in Silicon Valley.

What the real monkey thinks, the virtual monkey does.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. The outcome is a halt in federal funding for machine translation R&D. Darpa launches its Spoken Language Systems (SLS) program to develop apps for voice-activated human-machine interaction. Researchers focus on portable systems for face-to-face English-language business negotiations in German and Japanese.

Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell's machine – or rather, the server farm it's connected to a few miles away – is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scien tists for half a century. The message isn't encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. I brought along the text, taken from a Spanish newspaper transcript of a 2004 al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings, to test Meaningful Machines' automated translation software. The brainchild of a quirky former used-car salesman named Eli Abir, the company has been designing the system in secret since just after 9/11. Now the application is ready for public scrutiny, on the heels of a research paper that Carbonell – who is also a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the school's Language Technologies Institute – presented at a conference this summer. In it, he asserts that the company's software represents not only the most accurate Spanish-to-English translation system ever created but also a major advance in the field of machine translation. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

An open letter calling for a ban on lethal weapons controlled by artificially intelligent machines was signed last week by thousands of scientists and technologists, reflecting growing concern that swift progress in artificial intelligence could be harnessed to make killing machines more efficient, and less accountable, both on the battlefield and off. But experts are more divided on the issue of robot killing machines than you might expect. The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by many leading AI researchers as well as prominent scientists and entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak. "Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is--practically if not legally--feasible within years not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms." Rapid advances have indeed been made in artificial intelligence in recent years, especially within the field of machine learning, which involves teaching computers to recognize often complex or subtle patterns in large quantities of data.

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"].

The crowd went wild, almost as if it were a World Cup match. Actually, it was RoboCup 2002. The annual robotic soccer tournament was held in Fukuoka, Japan, this past June as the World Cup was getting under way. The timing was no coincidence. The notion of robots taking on Brazil would be laughable if roboticists around the world were not so enthusiastically answering the call.

Project Summary: This project explores the use of qualitative physics to provide capabilities for intelligent agents. Understanding and using common sense reasoning about the physical world is a necessary prerequisite to creating many kinds of useful intelligent agents that collaborate with human partners to accomplish tasks. Examples of such tasks include damage control assessment, operations planning, sifting through on-line information for relevant data, teaching and tutoring, and developing complex scientific and engineering models. Our vehicle for these investigations is the creation of an experimental prototype, an Explanation Agent that accumulates explanations of how engineered systems work, and that uses this accumulated knowledge to answer questions and interactively formulate task-specific models of those systems.