If you've been to the RoboGames, you've seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball -- or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact. The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain.

Remember those kids in high school who got all A's, never had a bad hair day and never broke a rule but always called you out when you did? They got on your nerves for being so perfect, didn't they? Given that meaningful human interaction often hinges on relatability, we often tend to prefer the company of those who show very real humanness. If they have imperfections -- not misplaced screws or actuators, but human-like behavioral flaws -- people are more prone to forge successful working relationships with them, according to a new study out of the UK's University of Lincoln. The findings could have significant implications as people increasingly rely on social robots for tasks like helping seniors stay active and aiding autistic kids in the classroom.

Google may be getting even more serious about business. The company is in talks with Hewlett-Packard about expanding the Internet giant's Google Now voice recognition software to be able to search through corporate data, according to a report published Wednesday by The Information (subscription needed). The partnership would allow Google Now --- which serves as a "virtual assistant" that lets users ask it about restaurants, driving directions or sports scores -- to do the same thing with company data. For example, an enterprise user on a device running Android, Google's mobile operating system, would be able to ask the software about financial information or inventory data. HP would be valuable to Google in this case because of its wealth of relationships with corporate customers.

D-Wave Systems, the leading manufacturer of the world's first commercially available quantum computers, is the most well funded and far along player in the quantum chip race, but hasn't yet succeeded in convincing scientists that its machines are successfully achieving quantum speedup. In other words, we're not sure that its product is speedier than traditional, silicon-based machines. In fact, in certain situations, the $15 million D-Wave Two is still no faster than the computer on your desk right now. A research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports that there is still a lack of definitive evidence that the D-Wave Two can perform functions any faster than traditional machines. The results of the test were published in the journal Science Thursday, though the work of head physicist Matthias Troyer has been widely circulated since January because the paper was available in pre-print.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, AT&T teamed up with New York University's Ability Lab to challenge app developers to use their network and technology to make life easier for people with disabilities. Together they launched the Connect Ability Challenge, designed to spur innovation for people with physical, social, emotional and cognitive disabilities. Winners of the contest, which saw a total of 63 submissions, were announced Monday. In total, AT&T awarded $100,000 in cash. That included a $25,000 grand prize for Kinesic Mouse, software that uses Intel's Real Sense Web camera to detect facial expressions and head rotations, enabling people to operate their personal computers hands-free.

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.

Recently there has been renewed interest in game theory in several research disciplines, with its uses ranging from the modeling of evolution to the design of distributed protocols. In the AI community, game theory is emerging as the dominant formalism for studying strategic and cooperative interaction in multi-agent systems. Classical work provides rich mathematical foundations and equilibrium concepts, but relatively little in the way of computational and representational insights that would allow game theory to scale up to large, complex systems. The rapidly emerging field of computational game theory is addressing such algorithmic issues, and this tutorial will provide a survey of developments so far. As the NIPS community is well-poised to make significant contributions to this area, special emphasis will be placed on connections to more familiar topics.