Dr. Brad Duchaine, Associate Professor Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, says facial recognition is a sophisticated, yet universal skill humans have. "It's really a complicated system and it involves a number of different grey areas (but) visual recognition is something everybody is really good at," Duchaine said. "It comes built-in with the brain. We're capable of doing face processing just minutes after being born." Balas, who has done research on how social interactions can influence face perception and memory, said it's amazing the type of information humans can draw from a quick glance of someone's face.

Artificial intelligence promises to fundamentally change the way humans live. By replicating intelligence on any level, we can begin to automate all kinds of jobs and otherwise human tasks, shifting the economy and potentially eliminating the need for a flesh-and-blood workforce. Turns out that idea perks up some ears at the White House. The National Science and Technology Council subcommittee on machine learning and artificial intelligence will start to meet next week, for the purpose of "monitor state-of-the-art advances and technology milestones in artificial intelligence and machine learning within the Federal Government, in the private sector, and internationally; and help coordinate Federal activity in this space." Additionally the White House will be holding four events in Summer 2016, to create more dialogue on how A.I. could change the United States.

A partial digital reconstruction of the brain previously made by Harvard. We've talked a lot about making a computer that works like the mammalian brain. The U.S. government is now betting $28 million dollars that all these projects are wrong. A series of three grants snagged by Harvard University from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) last week has funded a "moonshot" project to throw out all of the previous attempts at understanding the brain and start fresh. But while DARPA focuses on military projects, IARPA focuses on intelligence agency research.)

In 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration will admit military, private, and commercial drones into U.S. airspace. The move could dramatically increase the number of unmanned aircraft shooting through the skies, and with it, the value of the domestic drone economy. The Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International estimates that the new regulations will result in "100,000 jobs created and economic impact of $82 billion" by 2025. For several cities and states across the country, that means one thing: ka-ching. Take North Dakota, where law enforcement, local government, federal agencies, and universities have already laid the groundwork for the coming drone-volution.

When the Navy's X-47B drone screamed skyward off the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in May, those of us standing on the flight deck knew we were witnessing history: a robot flying itself--no pilot in the cockpit or on the ground, guiding the aircraft with a joystick. It was the first time an autonomous war plane had completed a catapult launch from a carrier deck. And it was just the latest milestone for the X-47B. Here are some of the others: It's the first tailless, "batwing"-style airframe (it's technically known as a "cranked kite" design) to takeoff and land on a carrier. It's the first jet-powered drone to operate from a carrier as well as the first unmanned combat fighter jet analog to come this far in its development.

Senators, law enforcement officials, and assorted experts attended a judiciary hearing yesterday to discuss the implications of drones in U.S. airspace. Right now drones aren't a part of everyday life for most Americans, but that's changing with 81 organizations--including government agencies, police departments, and universities-- cleared to fly robots in the U.S. and more expected down the line. In 2015, the Federal Aviation Authority plans to allow the first commercial use of drones in the United States. That might sound scary to people worried about a drone flying overhead and--legally--snapping pictures of them in their backyard sunning in their birthday suit. Thing is, that future has already arrived.

DARPA's vision for scavenging and salvaging dead satellites in orbit continues its trudge toward technologic feasibility. DARPA launched its Phoenix initiative in summer of last year hoping to cobble together a robot capable of intercepting, dismantling, and rebuilding defunct satellites even as they whip through space some 22,000 miles above the Earth. It's a tall order, requiring all kinds of capabilities that are less-than-fully mature, things like robotic autonomy/artificial intelligence, machine vision, and on-orbit satellite refueling. But if a new video released by DARPA is any indication, work on the Phoenix satellite scavenger is progressing. That's not to say a vehicle launch is in the immediate offing, but the video above--illustrated by an animation of how each technology piece would work within the larger concept--shows piece by piece how the project is moving forward.

We've long been fans of the self-sustaining, wave-powered Waveglider, a maritime robot that can harvest propulsion energy from the rolling motion of ocean waves to operate far from shores indefinitely--or at least until something breaks down. Durability, then, is key to Waveglider's seafaring success, and this this year it proved its hardiness several times over. First, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began custom-fitting the Waveglider to be a long-endurance weather monitoring platform capable of staying at sea for many months at a time to intercept hurricanes and other storms gathering far from shore--a major vote of confidence for the technology. Then we learned in early November that one of NOAA's Wavegliders had deployed (and survived) off the coast of New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy, withstanding the full brunt of her destructive power as she came ashore (while beaming reams of valuable data to meteorologist back onshore). And finally, we learned that the first of four Wavegliders that set off from San Francisco last year on a trans-Pacific crossing had reached Australia, proving these robots are ready for long-duration science missions at sea with virtually no human help or interference.

MIT's Robust Robotics Group seems to be as thrilled with the Kinect and the hacking possibilities that emanate therefrom as we are. They've attached a Kinect to a quadrocopter, which enables completely autonomous 3-D mapping and flight--even the processing is done on board. MIT worked with the University of Washington on this project, using UW's SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms to construct these pretty models of the environment, using the data picked up by the Kinect's sensors. The SLAM maps are actually kind of a bonus on top of the main function of the project, which is to enable fully autonomous flight in areas without GPS coverage: SLAM maps are processed off site, but they're not necessary to the operation of the quadrocopter. The project has some pretty obvious military uses, which explains why it was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office (way to mix up the naming conventions, guys).

At Carnegie Mellon University, one robotics student estimates that there are more robots than students in the department, but in a shameful display of mammalian arrogance, the precise number and type of said robots is unknown. That realization led the student, Heather Knight, to begin the world's first robot census. Knight, a graduate student in robotics (Carnegie Mellon is the only school in the country to offer a degree program in robotics), began by counting the 547 robots present on the CMU campus, not including its government-run satellite lab in which several hundred secret robots are estimated to be languishing. But that was only the beginning. The quest to document robots spread from Carnegie Mellon to the Makers, a community of DIY enthusiasts organized loosely by MAKE Magazine and its accompanying Maker's Faire events. Knight put out word on the census through the Makers, and set up her own online census, which, it should be noted, is far more in-depth than the U.S. government's census.