If you're too lazy to mow your own lawn, and too lazy to supervise a robot that will mow your own lawn, then outdoor equipment maker Husqvarna has an app for you. My Automower is a free app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that lets you control Husqvarna Automowers with GPS such as the 260 ACX from anywhere. The app displays the location of the Automower on Google Maps, and can order the machine to start or stop mowing, and automatically recharge itself. Users can also set mowing times and check the status of their Automower, as well as view instructional videos on its use. GPS is standard on the 260 ACX, which can mow 1.4 acres, recharge automatically, and text users if something disturbs its mowing.

Children too sick to go to school are still getting an education--thanks to robots in the classroom that transmit lessons back to the student. Stepan Supin, 12, of Moscow has been battling leukemia for two years, and his immune system is so weak he can't leave home. However, telepresence technology allows him to go to school via remote-controlled robot. The R.BOT 100 was developed by Moscow's 3Detection Labs several years ago, and it's been helping Stepan study history, geography, and languages since September. Priced at roughly $3,000, the R.BOT 100 moves around on a wheeled base and has a display, Web cam, microphone, speakers, and an Internet link so Stepan can interact with his classmates and teacher.

If you thought your English teacher was a robotic bore, spare a thought for kids in South Korea. They're being taught by real robots. The city of Daegu introduced 29 robot teachers in 19 elementary schools as part of a large-scale project to robotize teaching. The ambitious effort envisioned robots in all 8,400 kindergartens in Korea by 2013. Kids at Hakjung Elementary School seemed thrilled to interact with robots like the globular Engkey (above and in the vid below).

Results of the census, we are told, can influence the allocation of federal funds for education programs, law enforcement, and highways--and apparently tell us how many crazy robots are running loose. Well, at least the Carnegie Mellon Robot Census 2010 can tell us the last one. So far, it has tallied 547 robots on the CMU campus, including Tank LaFleur the "roboceptionist," Boss, winner of the 2008 DARPA Grand Challenge, and Opto-Isolator, the artbot that watches you with its big roving eye. It all started when Heather Knight, a first-year Ph.D. student at CMU's Robotics Institute, decided bots at the school deserved to stand up and be formally counted. "As much as we're here for the professors," she explained, "we're also here for the robots."

If you think robots are heartless piles of plastic and silicon, you're correct. But soccer-playing humanoid robot Nao has been evolving by developing "emotions" under a European project and is now being used in the U.S. in sessions to treat autistic children. Under the recently concluded Feelix Growing project--aimed at designing bots that can detect and respond to human emotional cues--researchers at the University of Hertfordshire's Adaptive Systems Group and other centers have been trying to get Nao to simulate human emotions. Researcher Lola Canamero and colleagues have been programming Nao--created by Aldebaran Robotics and used worldwide as a research bot--based on how human and chimpanzee infants interact with others. Working with a budget of some $3.2 million, the researchers have been trying to create robots that can be better companions for people.

I remember programming turtle graphics in Logo when I was in high school. These days, students can learn basic computer science from a robot developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. The Finch was co-developed by Tom Lauwers at CMU's Create lab. It's designed to be an interactive, programmable teaching aid to get students into computer science and robotics. Programmable with Java and Python, the bird-like bot runs on a 15-foot USB cable and comes with temperature and light sensors, a bump sensor, and a three-axis accelerometer that can be used as a mouse.

The machine learning summer school series was started in 2002 with the motivation to promulgate modern methods of statistical machine learning and inference. It was motivated by the observation that while many students are keen to learn about machine learning, and an increasing number of researchers want to apply machine learning methods to their research problems, only few machine learning courses are taught at universities. Machine learning summer schools present topics which are at the core of modern Machine Learning, from fundamentals to state-of-the-art practice. The speakers are leading experts in their field who talk with enthusiasm about their subjects. This page contains links to past and current schools, as well as the tentative plans for the next years. Note that the videos of many past MLSS courses are available at Videolectures.

Artificial intelligence is an evolving field that requires broad training, so courses typically involve principles of computer science, cognitive psychology and engineering. These are the best artificial intelligence programs. Sign up for Grad Compass to get complete access to U.S. News rankings and school data.

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips's technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone. But in 2008, Mr. Phillips's company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. "I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market," Nuance's chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation. Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci's company filed the first of six lawsuits. Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci's firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees. When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won.

Last August, Sebastian Thrun, the brains behind Google's self-driving cars and one of the world's top AI experts, offered an online version of Stanford's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to absolutely anyone who wanted to take it, for free. It turned out to be just a little bit popular (over 150,000 students enrolled), and now Thrun is offering a new, totally free, seven-week online course called Programming a Robotic Car. Can I really learn how to build a self-driving car in 7 weeks? In seven weeks, you will learn the basics of all the primary systems involved in programming a robotic car. Mad props to Professor Thrun for staying focused on the camera and barely glancing once at where the car was taking him.