Donald Michie, a versatile British scientist and early theorist of artificial intelligence who helped develop a "smart" industrial robot and then applied the technology to diverse fields, died on July 7 in Britain. Dr. Michie (pronounced MICK-ee) died in a car accident near London along with his former wife, Anne McLaren, a biologist and pioneering researcher in the field of reproduction. In the early 1970s, in work that received international attention and helped make Britain a force in advancing artificial intelligence, Dr. Michie led a team that produced "Freddy," a computer-directed robotic arm that could choose and assemble parts from a jumbled and potentially confusing array. To demonstrate Freddy's capabilities, Dr. Michie programmed the machine to put together the parts of a toy truck. Nils J. Nilsson, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford University and a former chairman of the department of computer science there, said the machine was "ahead of its time" and impressed researchers at Stanford and elsewhere as "one of the first automatic assembly systems in the world."

Anita Borg, a computer scientist who devoted much of her career to the advancement of women in computer science, died on Sunday at her mother's home in Sonoma, Calif. The cause was brain cancer, said her husband, Winfried Wilcke. Although highly respected as a computer scientist, Dr. Borg made her biggest mark as a champion and mentor of women in what has traditionally been a man's field. Through the several programs she founded, she became virtually synonymous with involving women in the emerging science. In 1987, after returning from a technical conference where she was one of only a handful of women present, Dr. Borg started Systers, an electronic mailing list on technical subjects exclusively for women who are engineers.

Charles A. Rosen, an engineer who was an early researcher in robotic and artificial intelligence and a founder of Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino, Calif., died on Dec. 8 at his home in Atherton, Calif. Born in Montreal, Mr. Rosen came to the United States as a teenager. He studied electrical engineering at Cooper Union in New York City and earned a Ph.D. at Syracuse University. During World War II, he returned to Canada to work on Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft being sent to Britain. After the war, he worked on transistor theory at General Electric Research Laboratories in Schenectady, N.Y., and was the coauthor of an early book on the subject.

Dr. Anne Foerst, 34, a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of M.I.T.'s God and Computers project, apologized on a recent afternoon that a certain robot named Kismet wouldn't be joining our interview. ''Cynthia Breazeal, who built Kismet, is away in Japan right now and there's no getting her going,'' Dr. Foerst said in her German accent, ''but you'd love her. At the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, engineers are trying to build robots with social skills and humanlike experiences, and so, as an experiment, they've created creatures that they think humans will relate to. Dr. Foerst, a Lutheran minister who supported herself by repairing computers during eight years of higher education in Germany, serves as theological adviser to the scientists building Kismet and the robot's brother, Cog. What exactly do people do here at this laboratory? A. We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied.

Come the summer, many minds will turn to sport as the London Olympics kicks off. So it seems apt that, in a special issue this week, Nature invites its readers to embrace and celebrate a superb marathon runner -- who also happened to be one of the brightest minds of all time. Alan Turing, computer pioneer, wartime code-breaker and polymath, was born in London on 23 June 1912. But for injury, he would probably have joined the British Olympic team for the London games of 1948. Yet, 100 years and one month after his birth, when the Olympics will return to the city, no official celebration of the connection is planned.

In 1955 the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term artificial intelligence, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – included organising the first Dartmouth conference on artificial intelligence, and developing the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the radical idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers. It helped spawn a whole AI industry. McCarthy was also the first to propose a time-sharing model of computing.

Born in the vicarage in Lenham, Kent, he was the second of the parish priest's three children. He joined The Pilgrim's school, Winchester, in 1932 and became a senior chorister at the cathedral. Three years later, he won the top entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where his precocious talents in mathematics and music flourished. In 1941, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read chemistry, but at the end of his first year also took part one of the music tripos, and was appointed Balliol organ scholar. In his second year, Christopher performed what Dr John Jones has described as "probably the greatest intellectual feat by a Balliol undergraduate ever": he proposed, with convincing arguments, the correct structure of the chemical compound diborane (B2H6) - a compound that defied contemporary chemical valency principles.

The American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who has died aged 82, won the 1958 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for showing that bacteria can conjugate and exchange small strips of genetic material. Among the consequences of this was the realisation that antibiotic resistance can be passed around between bacteria, rather than emerging from selective breeding of resistant strains. This opened new paths in genetic research. He went on to a distinguished career in science policy, advising government committees and presidents, heading Rockefeller University and writing a Washington Post column on science and society. Lederberg's father was an orthodox rabbi - the family had come to New York from Palestine - who wanted Joshua to follow in his footsteps.

MUNICH, Germany Computer pioneer and philosopher Joseph Weizenbaum (85) has died in Berlin. The scientist and MIT professor emeritus was known for his critical position towards the impact of information technology to society. Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Weizenbaum had emigrated in 1936 to the United States. After having contributed to the development of the first analog computers and participating in the design of the first digital computers for banking applications, Weizenbaum in 1963 took a position at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT); from 1970 he was professor for computer science. Among his major achievements were studies over the SLIP programming language and research on basic software technologies which today are in widespread use such as garbage collection algorithms.

Christos Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, is this year's recipient of the Katyanagi Prize for Research Excellence. Carnegie Mellon University has cited Dr. Papadimitriou as "an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial intelligence, networks and game theory." We recently spoke with Papadimitriou, where among other topics we delved into the underpinnings of science, the economics of the programming market, the mysterious complexity of the Web, quantum computing, and the computer scientist as popular novelist. Next month, we talk with Dr. Erik Demaine, recipient of this year's Katyanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. CP: I didn't know I had been nominated. She mentioned the previous winner, so I thought someone else won the prize and that I was invited to speak at the ceremony. I replied, "Yeah, okay, let me think about it, give me a week..." She wrote back in astonishment, thinking I was not accepting the prize!