The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Del., where he was apparently an indifferent student, according to his biographical entry in the Wikipedia. After a stint in the U.S. Army (during which he was treated for a brain tumor), Backus ended up in New York City, where he gravitated toward mathematics. Earning a master's degree in the discipline in 1949, he joined International Business Machines the following year to work on the firm's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator. The SSEC was one of the last of the large electromechanical computers ever built. It also was one of the first to run a stored program.

The typical ways in which patients get matched up with clinical trials aren't exactly state of the art. At hospitals, clinical coordinators painstakingly sort through patient records, looking for people that fit the requirements of a given experimental treatment; meanwhile, patients bring their own Internet research to their doctors, asking if some new drug might help them. The Mayo Clinic is now seeking to improve this process by putting IBM Watson on the job. The artificial intelligence known as IBM Watson can scan enormous troves of written information thanks to its natural language processing skills, and its machine learning programming means it quickly gets better at using that information to complete a given task. Most famously, it quickly got better at answering Jeopardy questions, and tromped the human competition in a 2011 exhibition match.

A new computer model can now mimic the human ability to learn new concepts from a single example instead of the hundreds or thousands of examples it takes other machine learning techniques, researchers say. The new model learned how to write invented symbols from the animated show Futurama as well as dozens of alphabets from across the world. It also showed it could invent symbols of its own in the style of a given language. The researchers suggest their model could also learn other kinds of concepts, such as speech and gestures. Although scientists have made great advances in machine learning in recent years, people remain much better at learning new concepts than machines.

University of Alberta's "Hyperborean" program wins three gold medals What strategies help a computer program win at Texas Hold'Em?

Twenty patients with an aggressive form of brain cancer will have a new doctor on their medical team: the learned geneticist known as IBM Watson. In a collaboration announced today between IBM and the New York Genome Center, IBM's Jeopardy-beating AI will analyze the genomes of those 20 patients in hopes of providing insights for their oncologists. IBM has been promoting its AI as a killer app for health care, thanks to Watson's natural language processing skills and machine learning abilities. Over the past two years Watson has been engaged in a separate project at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in which doctors are training the AI to understand the language of medicine. In that project, Watson is being taught to read patients' records and search the medical literature for relevant suggestions on treatment.

This past October saw the death of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a phrase he is credited with inventing. It capped a sad month that also saw the passing of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and of Dennis Ritchie, the coinventor of Unix and the C programming language. John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927, but he grew up near Caltech, where he got his B.S. in mathematics. He detoured to Princeton for his Ph.D. but ended up at MIT, where he cofounded its artificial-intelligence lab, the world's first, before going on to Stanford in 1962 to found its artificial-intelligence lab. In between, he found time to invent Lisp, one of the most influential programming languages ever created.

If you're lucky, you may not lose your job to a robot in the future. That doesn't, however, mean that your boss won't lose his or her job to a robot in the future. And if (when) that happens, what's it going to be like working for a robot? A study from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, suggests that you'll probably obey them nearly as predictably as you would a human. Here's how this experiment worked, and I'm going to do some copying and pasting from the paper because a.) it's very well written and does a great job of explaining things and b.) it's late and I'm tired. But the important thing to know going in is that the experiment was designed to try to get participants to do an incredibly boring task that they really didn't want to do, and then see if they either spent 80 minutes working on it, or objected five separate times despite verbal prodding to continue.

Its creators nicknamed it the "Luke Arm," after Luke Skywalker's ultra-advanced bionic limb. Now, after nearly eight years of development and testing, this robotic arm for amputees has been approved for commercialization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The "Luke Arm," whose official name is DEKA Arm System, is one of the most advanced robotic prostheses ever built. According to the FDA, this is the first prosthetic arm approved by the agency that "translates signals from a person's muscles to perform complex tasks." The DEKA Arm was created by famed inventor Dean Kamen and his team at DEKA Research and Development Corp., in Manchester, N.H., as part of DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to search videos for what people are actually saying instead of relying on tags or descriptions? Koemei (pronounced "co-may") aims to do just that through their cloud-based speech recognition software that rapidly transcribes video and audio, even if people have accents or more than one person is speaking. But the startup is also targeting the large quantities of media content from videoconferencing, webcasting, and classroom lectures being produced in business, government, and educational institutions, and by indexing the transcripts, video libraries will become easily searchable. According to the company, it currently takes about an hour for its system to automatically transcribe one hour of media at a cost of about $0.09 a minute, much cheaper than manual transcription, though user pricing for the service has not been announced. Building on 8 years of research, the startup comes out of the Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, and is in the process of raising $1.5 million is a Series A round on top of its Angel funding since its 2010 launch.