Marvin Minsky, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. In 1958 he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Subsequently known as the AI Lab, it became a mecca for artificial intelligence research. His published works included Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence (1960), a manifesto that profoundly shaped AI in its earliest days, and Society of Mind (1985), which postulated that the brain is fundamentally an assembly of interacting, specialised, autonomous agents for tasks such as visual processing and knowledge management. That view of the architecture of the mind remains a cornerstone of AI research.

It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione? With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

Victor Scheinman, who has died aged 73, designed the first electrically powered, computer-controlled industrial robot, proving that it was possible for machines to do complex manual work. Scheinman's invention, known as the Stanford arm, was a programmable robot with six rotational joints, allowing it to duplicate the shoulder, elbow and wrist movements of a human. Unlike previous machines, which could only perform one task repeatedly, the Stanford arm was capable of following a series of instructions. In 1974 an experimental arm built in accordance with Scheinman's design managed to assemble a car water pump without human help, using sensors to guide it. That same year Scheinman founded Vicarm Inc and began making his robot commercially. He soon fell in with the engineer and businessman Joseph Engelberger, who, with his colleague George Devol, had founded Unimation, the world's first robotics company.

In the late sixties while working at Ericsson he invented both sequence diagrams and use cases, and in later years worked on the SDL, UML and the RUP. We caught up with Dr Ivar Jacobson to hear his thoughts on where the industry is today, and where it will head in the future. Builder AU: What do you think of the state of software engineering today? Ivar Jacobson: What I see when I travel and talk to customers, participate in conferences and have discussions with experts around the world is that software development is very much still an immature discipline. We still rely on too much old work. Personally I am convinced we will change that dramatically, but it is a very slow process. I have been working on process improvement and new technologies for many years now, starting with component based development and then adding to that object orientation and now aspect orientation. I've been involved with new technology since the sixties, and I've been more optimistic than most -- it's my nature, but we are still struggling with basic stuff for many reasons.

If Algirdas Budrys–who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived–maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public. More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise."

We recently ran across Alelo (www.alelo.com), The company's very engaging, interactive 3D role playing games teach languages like Arabic and Pashto to troops being deployed to the Middle East. Using speech recognition and other technology, the titles teach foreign languages to players as they go through the game in simulated environments like Iraq. We spoke with Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, CEO of Alelo, about the firm's technology and plans. Ben Kuo: Tell us a little bit about Alelo, and what the company and product does?

Quantum information science is a young field, its underpinnings still being laid by a large number of researchers [see "Rules for a Complex Quantum World," by Michael A. Nielsen; Scientific American, November 2002]. Classical information science, by contrast, sprang forth about 50 years ago, from the work of one remarkable man: Claude E. Shannon. In a landmark paper written at Bell Labs in 1948, Shannon defined in mathematical terms what information is and how it can be transmitted in the face of noise. What had been viewed as quite distinct modes of communication--the telegraph, telephone, radio and television--were unified in a single framework. Shannon was born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, the son of a judge and a teacher.

Henry E. Kyburg Jr., a renowned and respected professor of philosophy and computer science at the University of Rochester, died of acute pancreatitis Oct. 30 at the age of 79 at Strong Memorial Hospital. He was well-known for his cutting-edge studies of uncertain inference, which is the human process of reaching conclusions, and data mining, the process by which computers search for information in data or draw conclusions from it. Kyburg, Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, was honored in 2007 with the University Award for Lifetime Achievement in Graduate Education. He was clearly admired by his students--who can be found working as pioneers themselves across all disciplines at research and educational institutions--for his insightful instruction, generous spirit, and relentless energy. "The last thing he said to me was'I would like a logic problem to work on,' because Henry was always scribbling, loved his work, and in general never stayed idle," said his wife Sarah Kyburg, who lived with her husband and eight children on their sustainable farm in Lyons, N.Y.

IBM computer scientists have been at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation in a broad range of research areas. They have made pioneering contributions in artificial intelligence, high-speed processor design, computer architecture, natural language processing, programming languages, optimizing compilers, operating systems, storage systems, computer-supported cooperative work, databases, speech recognition, integer programming and service-oriented architectures, to name a few. Audio podcast features short presentations on subjects ranging from micropayments to Ebola research. IBM researchers from worldwide labs summarize innovations in big data, cloud analytics, cognitive science and many other topics in computer science, electrical engineering and mathematical sciences. Recipients of annual awards, sponsored by Professional Interest Communities (PIC), for papers high in technical significance and impact on computer science, electrical engineering and mathematical sciences.