We recently ran across Alelo (www.alelo.com), The company's very engaging, interactive 3D role playing games teach languages like Arabic and Pashto to troops being deployed to the Middle East. Using speech recognition and other technology, the titles teach foreign languages to players as they go through the game in simulated environments like Iraq. We spoke with Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, CEO of Alelo, about the firm's technology and plans. Ben Kuo: Tell us a little bit about Alelo, and what the company and product does?

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots." The key reasons cited by humans for dissatisfaction with robots are: • "That infernal humming." PART II Our surveys reveal that extramarital infidelity is the "tipping point" for the deterioration of human-robot relationships. As noted elsewhere in roboliterature (see "Russian Robot Wives Date Cyclotrons," National Enquirer, March 2047), a notorious flaw of robots' artificial intelligence technology is an underdeveloped moral sense. Over 75 percent of human-robot marital spats involve rampant robot promiscuity.

A chatbot is an artificial conversational entity: basically, an A.I. that talks with people. The chats can take the form of written text or even voice. There are many chatbot technologies available now, but an ISIS recruit bot would be more complicated than something like Elbot. An ISIS recruit chatbot would need to be sophisticated enough to trick an ISIS recruiter--a person with limited resources--into believing that the entity on the other end is real. Anything less and the recruiter will not waste time and bandwidth chasing digital deceivers.

This observation serves as the core of what he and other world leaders are terming "the Fourth Industrial Revolution," the theme of this year's wintry summit in Switzerland. Building on the German government's "Industry 4.0," the current national strategy for "smart" factories integrating physical manufacturing with the Internet of Things, Schwab and the WEF argue that the coming years--likely littered with 3-D printers and designer babies--will mark the beginning of a revolution unlike any we have ever experienced, unique for its scale, scope, and complexity. They cite the convergence of multiple sectors of technology and industry (artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, autonomous vehicles, to name a scant few) as evidence that humans are entering a new era of profound, exponentially increasing possibility and risk.

Fremont resident Rakesh Guliani likes to say that a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner saved his marriage. Messy floors had been causing friction, says the 41-year-old Guliani (pronounced Goo-liani). His wife, Kavita, 35, was particularly annoyed by the footprints he and their daughters, Ashna, 10, and Rhea, 6, tended to track through the house. "I am soccer coach to both of them, and when we come in with our dirty cleats, I am more tolerant of that because I am tracking dirt, too," says Guliani, vice president of the job-placement firm Park Computer Systems. He vacuumed several times a week but it never seemed enough to satisfy his wife, a technical writer for Google.

During a recent product demonstration at SRI headquarters in Menlo Park, computer scientist Harry Bratt spoke into the microphone of his lab's new translation computer: "Did you hear the explosion this morning?" The recording demonstrates how the computer translates English into the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Also, CNET reviews video cams and David Einstein has advise on digital cameras.] Several seconds later, software written by SRI International scientists piped the question through the computer's speaker -- this time in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Saad Alabbodi, an Iraqi immigrant posing as a civilian being questioned by a U.S. soldier, answered in his native tongue. There was another pause as the computer translated Alabbodi's reply into English in a mock interrogation that provided another example of how technology is slowly mimicking complex human capabilities such as speech.

Buoyed by the success of two robotic rovers exploring the surface of Mars, NASA scientists are building smarter and more- agile robots that can rappel down cliffs, slither between cracks and even have the sense to detect trouble. Scientist Silvano Colombano stood next to one of the new machines on a recent morning at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where he demonstrated an eight-legged robot called Scorpion. It can climb up steep hills and plunge into rough terrain where its wheeled counterparts can't go. Next to Colombano, computer engineer Maria Bualat showed off the K9 rover, a robot similar to the Mars rovers, but one that can perform tasks 10 times faster than its cousins, which have been exploring the Red Planet since early last year. The new robots might get their chance in a few years.

Researchers at The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, are perfecting a security algorithm that views and analyzes the way people move on campus. Developed by James W. Davis, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the university, the system combines video cameras with machine learning methods, enabling the computer to perform the kind of visual recognition that seems effortless for humans. It "remembers" typical traffic patterns and spots anomalies. It will be designed to flash on a stumbling or wandering person that may look questionable to security personnel: are they having a stroke? First implemented in the fall of 2009, the OSU smart system employs standard security cameras to scan views of thousands of people and identify potential problems.

Call it artificial intelligence with a human touch. This week, two California universities separately announced new centers devoted to studying the ways in which AI can help humanity. The University of California's Viterbi School of Engineering and its School of Social Work said Wednesday that they had joined forces to launch the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions. A day earlier, the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled its newly minted Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Even as science and technology pundits, including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, warn of the overthrow of humanity by advanced artificial intelligence -- a prospect that appears nowhere on the horizon, experts say -- scientists are increasingly looking to the ways in which AI might aid humans.

A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system--the vaunted Patriot--made the same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed. The missile battery that targeted the two jets was almost entirely automated.