The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. "If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', "But if you walk in and say'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from "The Sims" to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. Electronic Arts, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has sold 58 million copies of "The Sims," making it the best-selling video game of all time. Players can choose characters, build and furnish houses for them, and take care of them as they interact with each other. Carnegie Mellon will use the Sims characters in its "Alice" course, which is designed to make basic programming more palatable to students by allowing them to move animated figures around on the computer screen rather than writing abstruse lines of code. Alice, first developed a decade ago, already has its own set of animated characters, which Dr. Pausch described as "the best we could make with our own two hands.

Trails are narrow ribbons of civilization cutting through wilderness. They are as much about what is worth exploring as they are about what's off limits. A hiker loses a trail, and suddenly they're in a deep wilderness, unmoored from the world until they stumble back to that thin filament again. To find missing hikers, it makes sense to look near trails, and to do that, a team at the University of Zurich is training drones to identify and follow trails into the woods. The drone used by the Swiss researchers observes the environment through a pair of small cameras, similar to those used in smartphones.

Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence. Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says. Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data. Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that's custom built for deep learning. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but one estimate put the value above $350 million.

Last year, the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center created the "Rollin' Justin" robot, a technical marvel that could catch a ball through a mix of precision, user input, and motion sensors. It proved to be a success, but there's only so much research you can do with a single-function robot. Enter "Agile Justin," the counterpart machine that can pitch a ball with a great deal of finesse. Huffington Post relayed video footage of the two robots in action, as each unit showed off their respective skills in a short game of catch. It's a neat thing to watch in terms of mechanical detail, especially when you consider that each robot has to mimic the hand-to-eye coordination required for a seemingly simple thing.

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe -- a class nearly four times the size of Stanford's entire student body. The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announcing on Tuesday. The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a "statement of accomplishment." For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.

Last spring, I taught a literature seminar called "Before Wikipedia." The subject was the history of encyclopedic writing, from ancient times to the present day. We read excerpts of Isidore of Seville's "Etymologies" and Diderot's "Encyclopédie" alongside works by Calvino, Sebald, and Flaubert. The word "Wikipedia" in the course title seemed to attract an unusual preponderance of science majors for a seminar in comparative literature. There were physicists and mathematicians, a cluster of coders, an engineer, a neuroscience major.

The first 11 teams for a race in which robot cars will jostle with real ones along mocked-up city streets have been announced. The teams must construct autonomous vehicles to navigate an unfamiliar urban environment in the shortest time possible. The robot racers will face a "simulated" urban course 96 kilometres (60 miles) in length in November 2007. The course will feature urban obstacles, such as trees and buildings, traffic signs and other moving vehicles. Its location is yet to be disclosed.

Debrief tool used in the experiment displays a video replay of the operator console (similar to this map display), and a timeline of events suggested by AEMASE for discussion during debrief. The tool also includes visualizations of entity movement over time. Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new "smart machine" installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students. Sandia National Laboratories' Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced "amaze") is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators. Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia computer scientist and AEMASE's inventor.

Soon they will be sophisticated enough to fill certain faculty roles at traditional universities. But to make this revolution work for students, academic leaders at those traditional institutions will need to broker a peace between artificially intelligent teaching programs and their human counterparts, according to a new report written by the former presidents of two prominent traditional universities on behalf of the nonprofit Ithaka S R. Online education has enabled many colleges to transition into the prevailing modern medium while adding new sources of revenue in times of scarcity, according to the Ithaka report. However, these innovative colleges have shown less interest in using the novel medium to curb tuition charges and measure learning outcomes. The report, called "Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education," was co-written by Lawrence S. Bacow and William G. Bowen, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities, respectively, along with several Ithaka analysts. It was bankrolled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.