Jan Krikke After 50 years of research and tinkering, machine translation might be ready to compete with human translators. Several companies have announced breakthroughs or substantial progress in MT research in recent months. In January, for example, Steven Klein, CEO of New York-based Meaningful Machines, announced that his company successfully tested new translation algorithms that he says could lead to translation engines replacing human translators. "While our current prototype is already outperforming other systems on limited resources," says Klein, "we expect to see significant improvement to our quality as both the target language corpus and the dictionary continue to increase in size, with a realistic goal of reaching human quality." "Although the prototype is only partially complete," says Klein, "we recently began blind testing from Spanish to English, and our system is already performing at higher quality levels on the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scale than any system we are aware of--0.6092. Systran, whose Spanish-to-English system is one of the best, scored a 0.5494 when we ran it through the same test, and the Systran system has been through many decades of development and incremental improvements." Meaningful Machines' test has not been independently verified, and the goal of reaching near-human quality translation will probably depend on some degree of pre- and post-editing for years to come. But, the growing number of global corporations (such as Philips, Samsung, and HP) and international agencies and institutions (such as the UN and the European Commission) using the technology illustrates that machine translation--the first nonnumerical application of AI--is finally delivering practical solutions. Popular perception of MT has suffered from low-quality "gisting" translation that Web-based translation engines, such as Babelfish and other online services, generate. But MT engines designed for limited domains, and tailor-made systems that use controlled language, are already delivering services. The site makes available a wealth of information previously inaccessible to non-Japanese speakers. MT has also made it to the desktop. The system is self-learning--it improves over time as its associative memory grows.

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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.

Computers are getting better each year at AI-style tasks, especially those involving vision--identifying a face, say, or telling if a picture contains a certain object. In fact, their progress has been so significant that some researchers now believe the standardized tests used to evaluate these programs have become too easy to pass, and therefore need to be made more demanding. At issue are the "public data sets" commonly used by vision researchers to benchmark their progress, such as LabelMe at MIT or Labeled Faces in the Wild at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The former, for example, contains photographs that have been labeled via crowdsourcing, so that a photo of street scene might have a "car" and a "tree" and a "pedestrian" highlighted and tagged. Success rates have been climbing for computer vision programs that can find these objects, with most of the credit for that improvement going to machine learning techniques such as convolutional networks, often called Deep Learning.

"Can you hold on a minute? I need to charge my robot." Uri Kartoun is developing robots, nicknamed EDNex and Clango, for handling suspicious packages. Down the hall, classmate Juan Wachs is working on a computer interface that responds to hand gestures. Both are enrolled in a joint master's/Ph.D. program in intelligent systems at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, located in Beersheba, Israel [see photo, " School Daze"]. But their reasons for choosing Ben-Gurion were very different and illustrate the range of issues prospective students should consider when choosing an engineering graduate program.

When I ask you to understand that sentence, I'm requiring you to take on a pretty significant undertaking, although you do it hundreds of times each day without really thinking about it. "Love" is a little more difficult, but not much. Given the grammatical structure and syntax, we can easily reduce the possible meanings of "love" (of which there are 28, according to Dictionary.com) down to a subset that have slightly different meanings, but all basically translate as, "have a strong liking for." While there is a margin of error here, it's minimal. The word "Jaguars" is a different story.

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.

Read about the world's tallest building, the longest bicycle, the most modern tractor and a discovered time capsule that cannot be opened until the year 2957. Shoe manufacturer New Balance is stepping onto the 3-D printing platform with a new running shoe that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole that can be customized to each runner. New Balance is making the shoe available for the first time in Boston in April, 2016 -- timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. It's difficult to believe that with all of the unrest in Iraq, a company such as AMBS Architects would propose building a skyscraper to rival Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 830-meters high. But here it is: the 1,152-meter-tall Bride's tower. The building is being suggested for Basra, located in the south of Iraq -- a rapidly growing center for business.

Read about the world's tallest building, the longest bicycle, the most modern tractor and a discovered time capsule that cannot be opened until the year 2957. Shoe manufacturer New Balance is stepping onto the 3-D printing platform with a new running shoe that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole that can be customized to each runner. New Balance is making the shoe available for the first time in Boston in April, 2016 -- timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. It's difficult to believe that with all of the unrest in Iraq, a company such as AMBS Architects would propose building a skyscraper to rival Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 830-meters high. But here it is: the 1,152-meter-tall Bride's tower.