Big news in AI this week: IBM's Watson project defeated "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night prime-time demo match. What does that win mean for computing, and more importantly, for humanity? That's the topic for this week's Reporters' Roundtable, and to discuss it we have two great guests, both with current books on the topics of computer vs. human competition. First up is Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker reported on the development of Watson from inside IBM headquarters to write this book.

Professor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). She worked in these areas since the late 1950s and made major contributions to the understanding of information systems. Her international status as a researcher was recognised by the most prestigious awards in her field, the ACM SIGIR Salton Award, the American Society for Information Science and Technologys Award of Merit, the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal, and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, as well as by her election as a Fellow of the British Academy, of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and as a European AI Fellow. Karen Spärck Jones started her research career at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in the late 1950s, working on the use of thesauri for language processing. At this time she collaborated with Roger Needham, whom she married in 1958.

Sargur N. Srihari, director of the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has won the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) Outstanding Achievements award. He is being honored with the award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and for his service to the community. Srihari recently traveled to Beijing to accept the award and serve as a keynote speaker at the conference, held bi-annually by the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Without machine learning, many computers that deal with rapidly changing data would require constant reprogramming.

For someone who devised a computer chess program as an MIT undergraduate in the late 1950s, helped create the world's first video game, and held a leadership role with the World Wide Web Consortium, Alan Kotok got his start in an inauspicious fashion -- or so he was told. Subscribers to the Boston Globe get unlimited access to our archives.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor and a pioneer in artificial intelligence whose famed computer program Eliza seemed to converse with humans in 1964, spent the rest of his life speaking out against substituting machines for human decision-making. "He was a critic of society and science and a true humanist who really touched people," said Peter Haas, a Vienna-based filmmaker who made the 2007 documentary "Weizenbaum. Mr. Weizenbaum, whose parents fled Nazi Germany when he was a boy, died March 5 in Groben, Germany, from cancer. One of his four daughters, Sharon Weizenbaum, recalled playing with the Eliza program in her father's study at her childhood home in Concord. "Eliza was something that was fun to fool around with," she said.

The future of AI is here and it's cognitive. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, professor at the University of California and vice president of the Fair Isaac Corporation, has discovered the universal mechanism of animal cognition and is now developing automated conversational customer service systems with human-level capabilities for use in a variety of industries. He believes his work may revolutionise the study of neuroscience and change the direction of AI research. Justin Richards, BCS, caught up with him to find out more. Please can you provide a brief overview of what you've been doing since your college years to the present day? Well since I'm old that wouldn't be very brief at all, so I'll summarise if possible! The fact is that since 1968 my passion has been understanding how cognition works and this is something I got into as a mathematics student, so I've always been leaning in the direction of trying to understand these things from underlying mathematical principles as implemented by neural tissue. Now as you know neurons are very difficult to study because the brain is a three dimensional structure and you can't even get at a neuron without destroying the tissue between you and it. Another problem is being able to witness the behaviour of neurons during normal behaviour is extraordinarily difficult. Even though centuries of study have gone on there's still very limited capability to do that. And if you can do it you can only do it for brief periods under extraordinarily tense conditions and you're never quite sure what you're seeing. So this is an important place where theory plays an important role because there is no theory that is definitive, so without a theory to tie it all together it's not very easy to make progress. Basically, I've been focused on building a theory, of course informed by the large number of microscopic facts that exist. So we know a great deal about the brain, and being able to appreciate and understand what is known, that's a process that takes decades in itself. And then being able to use that understanding to craft theories is a further difficulty. Anyway, I've been through all of that and have been working on this.

Karen Spärck Jones is winner of the 2007 BCS Lovelace Medal. BCS managing editor Brian Runciman interviewed her. This interview also appears in the ebook Leaders in Computing. By way of introduction, can you tell us something about your work? In some respects I'm not a central computing person, on the other hand the area I've worked in has become more central and important to computing. I've always worked in what I like to call natural language information processing. That is to say dealing with information in natural language and information that is conveyed by natural language, because that's what we use. I think that what has been happening is that those kind of things that were initially thought of as external applications, rather like accounting packages, are becoming more central and not just because more people are using browsers and search engines, but because the information itself they are working with is becoming much more central to what people do.

Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, has died of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 88. The mathematician and computer scientist was one of the world's foremost AI experts. As a student, he built one of the first neural-network learning machines, using vacuum tubes. He went on to cofound the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab, in 1959, with John McCarthy. Prof Minsky's ideas and influence were wide-ranging - from computational linguistics, mathematics and robotics - but underpinning it all was a desire, in his own words, "to impart to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning".

Computer pioneer Alan Kotok, an MIT alumnus who helped create both the first video game and the gaming joystick, died of a heart attack in his home in Cambridge, Mass., on Friday, May 26. A native of Philadelphia, he was 64. Kotok (S.B. 1962) entered MIT at age 16 and became swiftly involved in developing chess-playing computer programs, designing new systems for MIT's Tech Model Railroad and, with a group of friends, coming up with their original video game, Spacewar. Tim Berners-Lee, founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is housed in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, described Kotok as "one of the early wise men of computer science." The unflappable Kotok was "not only technically adept well beyond the norm, but also possessed a childlike delight in all things ingenious or intriguing. Wit, wisdom and sheer human warmth defined him, yet he commanded total respect. He would humbly take on anything which simply needed doing," Berners-Lee said.

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT who grew skeptical of artificial intelligence after creating a program that made many users feel like they were speaking with an empathic psychologist, died March 5 in Berlin. Weizenbaum, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany with his parents and arrived in the United States in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of his career with computers, in the early 1950s, he worked on analog computers; later, he helped design and build a digital computer at Wayne University in Detroit. In 1955, Weizenbaum became a member of the General Electric team that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. Among his early technical contributions were the list processing system SLIP and the natural language understanding program ELIZA, which was an important development in artificial intelligence and cemented his role in the folklore of computer science research.