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.

Amazon has published an online guide explaining how to access its virtual assistant Alexa via a Raspberry Pi. The technique presents a lower-cost alternative to buying one of its Echo devices - which are not yet available outside of the US - and an incentive to gain computer skills. The walkthrough includes access to the necessary app data and certificates in order to link the budget computer up to the tech giant's servers. The Raspberry Pi pocket-sized computer was designed by a British charity to encourage children and others to learn how to write computer programs. More than eight million units have been sold or given away.

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".

The end of the human race - that is what is in sight if we develop full artificial intelligence, according to Stephen Hawking in an interview with the BBC. But how imminent is the danger and if it is remote, do we still need to worry about the implications of ever smarter machines? My question to Professor Hawking about artificial intelligence comes in the context of the work done by machine learning experts at the British firm Swiftkey, who have helped upgrade his communications system. So I talk to Swiftkey's co-founder and chief technical officer, Ben Medlock, a computer scientist with a Cambridge doctorate which focuses on how software can understand nuance in language. Ben Medlock told me that Professor Hawking's intervention should be welcomed by anyone working in artificial intelligence: "It's our responsibility to think about all of the consequences good and bad", he told me.

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance. A robot arm builds "babies" that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention. The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings. The work by teams in Cambridge and Zurich has been published in the journal PLOS One. It seems like a plot from a science fiction film: a robot that builds other robots - each one better than the previous generation.

Activity observed in the brain when using a "mind machine" is similar to how the brain learns new motor skills, scientists have found. Participants' neural activity was recorded by using sensors implanted in their brain, which were linked to a computer that translated electrical impulses into actions. The researchers believe people will be able to perform increasingly complex tasks just by thinking them. The subjects in the study moved from thinking about a task to automatically processing a task, in a similar way to how other motor movements are learnt - like playing the piano or learning to ride a bicycle. This was shown by the areas of neurons that were active in the brain, which changed as subjects became more adept at a mental task.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.

He has formulated the notion of the hard problem of consciousness, seeking to explain the subjective aspects of mental processes. He is author of Constructing the World and four other books concerning the philosophy of consciousness. Davoudi was the co-author of the paper "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation", which outlines a possible method for experimentally detecting if the universe is actually a computer simulation by looking for anomalies characteristic of a simulation. Gates is a string theorist and author of Superspace, or 1001 Lessons In Supersymmetry. In a previous Asimov Debate, Gates claimed that he found error correcting code buried within the mathematical equations of supersymmetry.

Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. The term cognitive science, which gained currency in the last half of the 20th century, is used to refer to the study of cognition--cognitive structures and processes in the mind or brain, mostly in people rather than, say, rats or insects. Cognitive science in this sense has reflected a growing rejection of behaviorism in favor of the study of mind and "human information processing." The field includes the study of thinking, perception, emotion, creativity, language, consciousness and learning. Sometimes it has involved writing (or at least thinking about) computer programs that attempt to model mental processes or that provide tools such as spreadsheets, theorem provers, mathematical-equation solvers and engines for searching the Web.