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.

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.

Three decades ago, the U.S. government launched the Human Genome Project, a 13-year endeavor to sequence and map all the genes of the human species. Although initially met with skepticism and even opposition, the project has since transformed the field of genetics and is today considered one of the most successful scientific enterprises in history. Now the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research organization for the intelligence community modeled after the defense department's famed DARPA, has dedicated $100 million to a similarly ambitious project. The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS, aims to reverse-engineer one cubic millimeter of the brain, study the way it makes computations, and use those findings to better inform algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. IARPA has recruited three teams, led by David Cox, a biologist and computer scientist at Harvard University, Tai Sing Lee, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Andreas Tolias, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Do you find yourself worried by the implications of Humans, Channel 4's new drama about the exploits of near-human intelligent robots? Have you ever fretted over the apocalyptic warnings of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the threat of superintelligent artificial intelligence? Have your children ever lay wide-eyed thinking aboutrobot drone armies, such as those in Marvel's film Avengers: Age of Ultron? If you find this creepy or have answered "yes" to any of these questions, you should immediately watch footage from the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge.

During the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, which took place here June 5 and 6, the winning team's DRC-HUBO robot finished all eight tasks in less than 45 minutes. The winning bot had a humanoid design that could transform itself into a wheeled kneeling position for faster, more stable movement. The Running Man robot from Florida's Institute for Human and Machine Cognition claimed second, finishing all the tasks in just over 50 minutes. Team Tartan Rescue's CHIMP robot came in third, completing all the tasks in just over 55 minutes. The second and third place teams took home $1 million and $500,000, respectively.