Some students articulated the view that new regulations and government oversight over the use of cognitive technologies are required. One student suggested that deployments of cognitive technologies require specialized quality assurance, possibly provided by an "independent third party, similar to the auditors of today." But it's not too early to think about the issues that regulations might cover and how we address them. Regarding quality assurance, one thing is sure: new technologies fail in new and unexpected ways. Organizations building and deploying these technologies will need to consider how their testing and risk management procedures need to evolve.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University". In it, Professor Noam argued that the basic model of a university – which had been stable for hundreds of years – would be threatened by networked communications technologies. Under the classical model, universities were institutions that created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students or scholars wished to access that knowledge, they had to come to the university. But, Noam argued, the internet would threaten that model by raising the question memorably posed by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: "Where is the Library of Congress when it's on my desktop?"

Taking a computer science course will mean you will be studying a subject at the very forefront of technology and innovation. Computers are everywhere, and the demand to make them smaller, work more quickly, and be fitted with new and exciting software has never been greater. Most computing courses tend to focus on software engineering - things like database design, network systems, computer hardware, the internet. But there are other options in this field, such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and multimedia and games design, and apps design. You will be expected to be good at maths and an interest in physics would also help, as most of the theory will touch on both subjects.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday April 22 2004 The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Dan Dennett is a sailor, with a billowing white beard and moustaches that he twiddles when thinking. He uses "salty" as a term of praise and has just bought a 42ft boat that sleeps five and could, if he wished, cross the Atlantic. His passion for sailing may be the best way to approach his philosophy. In both, un-charted and dangerous areas are to be navigated by explorers ingeniously equipped. Like all sailors, he has stories. One concerns a French couple he met when sailing off Greenland. They were on their honeymoon, sailing from France to Iceland, then Greenland, and finally, in one long reach, from Greenland to the Falklands.

Turing proposed his test in a spirit of down-to-earth pragmatism. He saw that, when faced with the question, "Is it possible to build a machine that can think?", Turing hoped that his test would cut through a lot of fruitless semantic debate. It was an engineer's solution, rather than a philosopher's. Perhaps inevitably, Turing's proposal merely redirected the philosophical debate. Instead of quarrelling about the meaning of the verb "to think", philosophers argued about the meaning of the Turing test instead.

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.

Northwestern University Application: CogSketch People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. The goal of the CogSketch project is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, is being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), a National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center. The vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today.

But lately, it has been aiming much more directly at building HAL, or what's sometimes called the Google Brain. As I wrote in a recent article, a fast-emerging branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning is helping Google and other companies and researchers produce significant advances in machines that at least approach the way we think. It won't be long--for better or worse--before their work also has a profound impact on marketing and advertising as well. Deep-learning software tries to emulate, albeit in a still primitive way, the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the human brain where thinking occurs. The software, part of artificial neural networks that simulate the neocortex's large array of neurons, learns quite literally to recognize patterns in digital representations of sounds, images, and other data.

When I arrived at a Stanford University auditorium Tuesday night for what I thought would be a pretty nerdy panel on deep learning, a fast-growing branch of artificial intelligence, I figured I must be in the wrong place--maybe a different event for all the new Stanford students and their parents visiting the campus. Despite the highly technical nature of deep learning, some 600 people had shown up for the sold-out AI event, presented by VLAB, a Stanford-based chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum. The turnout was a stark sign of the rising popularity of deep learning, an approach to AI that tries to mimic the activity of the brain in so-called neural networks. In just the last couple of years, deep learning software from giants like, Facebook, and China's Baidu as well as a raft of startups, has led to big advances in image and speech recognition, medical diagnostics, stock trading, and more. "There's quite a bit of excitement in this area," panel moderator Steve Jurvetson, a partner with the venture firm DFJ, said with uncustomary understatement.

The biannual Launch CMU spotlights Carnegie Mellon students, graduates, and professors who combine expertise in cognitive science, computer science, artificial intelligence, educational psychology, and a large dose of creativity to create innovative advancements in education. Because the research and tech showcase focuses on entrepreneurship, the event included demos by various startups, including Expii, billed as a "community-built textbook that thinks like you do." According to its website, Expii makes it easy to create and rate interactive lessons, which simulate one-on-one tutoring experiences. Think rapid-fire question and answer, video, and more. Po-Shen Loh, a Carnegie Mellon math professor and founder of Expii, said his objective is to multiply the number of people who love math and science by 10. "We are creating a product of high value with very low variable and fixed costs, and we charge zero for it. Our team combines expert talent from math, science, and education. As math and science enthusiasts ourselves, we're uniting the enthusiast community to create its unique solution to education," Loh said.