The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI) has been involved in both basic and applied research in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, autonomy, and human-centered computing since its inception in 1981. NCARAI, part of the Information Technology Division within the Naval Research Laboratory, is engaged in research and development efforts designed to address the application of artificial intelligence technology and techniques to critical Navy and national problems. The research program of the Center is directed toward understanding the design and operation of systems capable of improving performance based on experience; efficient and effective interaction with other systems and with humans; sensor-based control of autonomous activity; and the integration of varieties of reasoning as necessary to support complex decision-making. The emphasis at NCARAI is the linkage of theory and application in demonstration projects that use a full spectrum of artificial intelligence techniques. The NCARAI has active research groups in Adaptive Systems, Intelligent Systems, Interactive Systems, and Perceptual Systems.

A building called Sustainability Base, at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., has an energy-efficient design that allows in sunlight. So for most of the year, the interior is illuminated by natural light. A building called Sustainability Base, at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., has an energy-efficient design that allows in sunlight. So for most of the year, the interior is illuminated by natural light. There's a building in Mountain View, Calif., where energy-saving technologies of the future are being tried on for size.

Google and NASA are betting that quantum forces are at work inside D-Wave's 512-bit chip. It's exactly the sort of futuristic thinking you'd expect from Google and NASA: Late last week, the organizations announced a partnership to build a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center. But questions surround the new type of computer at the lab's core. D-Wave systems, the company that makes the machine, says it is a quantum computer -- a machine that runs on the strange laws of quantum mechanics. But although the computer can solve a certain type of problem much faster than conventional computers, critics say that the company's claims are not supported by scientific evidence.

Some predict that technology will become more advanced than the human brain. Some predict that technology will become more advanced than the human brain. Ayesha and Parag Khanna are co-directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute. Ayesha is author of Straight Through Processing for Financial Services. Parag is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance.

The NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) is now using artificial intelligence to extend and improve its existing real-time quality control monitoring system. This system, called CORMS (Continuous Operational Real-time Monitoring System) operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week ensuring the availability and accuracy of the real-time water levels, currents and meteorological data provided by CO-OPS for navigational safety. CO-OPS is part of the NOAA Ocean Service.

The Air Force wants smart software that can help analysts identify targets from a disparate patchwork of high and low resolution imagery data, a solicitation reveals. The hope is that the technology can be used by counterinsurgency teams to detect improvised explosive devices and ground threats. The Pentagon is specifically interested in "machine learning" technology -- artificial intelligence capabilities that allow computers to recognize complex patterns and make intelligent decisions with repeated use. Defense envisions that the systems will get smarter with time if taught how to model the way in which humans detect anomalous targets. "The activity detection system has an opportunity to learn from the detections provided by the users," the solicitation says.

Baseball games have slowed down because, as players' salaries have increased, the value of each pitch and each swing has increased, as well. When a pitcher gets thirty starts in a season, a hundred pitches each, bucking for a twelve-million-dollar contract, each pitch is worth four thousand dollars. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" cost about two hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and Joss Whedon, its writer and director, appears to have taken his time, too--especially with the script. Whedon has done something similar to what he did in "The Avengers"--namely, to make a film that's in tune with the political zeitgeist as he perceives it. There, it was a post-9/11 revenge fantasy set against a backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.

When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time--in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia--no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the Alphane Moon" and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given that he has been dead for twenty years. It would be interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on.

"Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply." So said the armed robot in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie RoboCop. The suspect drops his weapon but a fault in the robot's software means it opens fire anyway. Nearly two decades later, such fictional weapon-toting robots are looking startlingly close to reality – and New Scientist has discovered that some may eventually help to decide who is friend and who is foe.

The first 11 teams for a race in which robot cars will jostle with real ones along mocked-up city streets have been announced. The teams must construct autonomous vehicles to navigate an unfamiliar urban environment in the shortest time possible. The robot racers will face a "simulated" urban course 96 kilometres (60 miles) in length in November 2007. The course will feature urban obstacles, such as trees and buildings, traffic signs and other moving vehicles. Its location is yet to be disclosed.