This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Nancy J. Nersessian's research is driven by the question "How do scientists think?" Nersessian's research focuses on how the cognitive and learning practices of scientists and engineers lead to creative and innovative outcomes. She is a Regents' Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology with joint appointments in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts School of Public Policy and the College of Computing School of Interactive Computing. Her research supports the insight that scientists think not only with ideas, but also with the artifacts they create to investigate nature.

Computer pioneer Willis Ware saw the future, and it worried him. In 1966, Ware, who worked as an engineer at Rand Corp., foresaw not only the omnipresence of personal computers, but also social networks like Twitter and Facebook. "The computer will touch men everywhere and in every way, almost on a minute-to-minute basis," he wrote in a paper presented at Rand 47 years ago. "Every man will communicate through a computer whatever he does. It will change and reshape his life, modify his career and force him to accept a life of continuous change."

Prof. Dr. (Juris) Jon Bing is the Institute leader of the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law, the second oldest academic institution in the world working specifically with the interrelationship of law and information / communication technology; Dr. Bing is the recipient of numerous international awards. He is the Editor of the news-letter Lov&data (Norwegian news-letter on computers and law, published by the Lawdata foundation) and is an editorial board member of over 16 international journals.

Robin John Popplestone, one of the early pioneers in Robotics and Computer Programming Languages, died on 14th April 2004 in Glasgow, Scotland, after a 10-year battle with prostate cancer. Robin was born in Bristol in 1938. After the war his family moved to Belfast, where he grew up. He was educated at Queen's University Belfast, receiving an honours degree in mathematics in 1960. He first worked with computing while studying for a PhD initially at Manchester University and then at Leeds University.

Born in South Africa, he was educated at the South African College High School, took a first degree at the University of Cape Town in 1934 and a doctorate in Mathematical Physics at the University of London in 1953. After a spell as demonstrator in physics at Cape Town, he emigrated to Britain. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, he undertook ionospheric research in Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, transferring to the Government's Telecommunications Research Establishment after the outbreak of hostilities to carry out research on radar. In 1941, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, leaving in 1943 to go to Aberdeen University to run a special degree course for radio officers under the wartime Hankey Scheme. After the war was over, he returned to industrial research, first until 1949 in Mullard's Radio Valve Company on microwave electronics and then on television and photo-electric tubes at EMI's Research Laboratories.

He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.

One day in the not-too-distant future, you will be able to buy a chair from Ikea, bring it home and watch it assemble itself in front of your eyes. In this same future world, if you are diagnosed with cancer, you might be injected with nano-robots that will track down and selectively kill the cancerous cells. You will feel nothing but mildly feverish in the process. Sentient chairs and cancer-fighting robots might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but these are two very real projects that Carlos Olguin is working on in his role as the director of the Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter Group at software giant Autodesk. Founded as a quirky Californian startup in the 1980s, the company has gone from producing AutoCAD design software for 8-bit PCs to speculating on the future of programmable lifeforms. "We are now looking at life as a design space," says Olguin when we meet in London, in between his hectic tour of synthetic biology research outfits.

Anant Agarwal is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of edX, a leading provider of massive open online courses, known as Moocs. Created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, edX is a non-profit, "open-source" organisation. Everybody should have access to a high-quality education. At edX we are applying technology to improve education in quality, scale and accessibility. We have about 1m people enrolled in edX.

Also known as chatbots, these are computer programs, web-based or not, with which one can hold a conversation. Some simulate artificial intelligence and many are humorous in nature. Focuses on creating genuine Artificial Intelligence - the technology that enables machines to converse with humans in natural language. Based on a groundbreaking approach, Ai's technology will pass the Turing Test for machine intelligence by 2011. Hobby project written in Visual Basic 6.0 by M.F.

Every year the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence is awarded to the chatbot software able to converse most like a human. It is a version of the Turing test, proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing. A program passes when a human judge cannot tell that they are talking to a machine. No machine has yet passed. But the winner of the Loebner Prize at the weekend – Elbot, brainchild of Fred Roberts at Artificial Solutions in Germany – came close, according to the contest's rather generous rules.