Many of us have ideas and dreams, which we hope may translate into commercial success. Increasingly, we turn to patent protection to safeguard the products of our ingenuity. Patents cover any new, useful and unobvious invention. Amazon's 1-Click checkout system, Viagra, the telephone, the lightbulb, Windows software, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, a novel windsurf board, Lego toy bricks, the artificial heart, cat's eye road reflectors, the computer mouse, and a unique cut of a diamond are all examples of past or current patents filed worldwide. Patents are global and cover hundreds of thousands of products and processes you may encounter in daily life, including some types of prescription pills, flatscreen televisions, windscreen wipers, pacemakers, satellite systems, plastic products.

In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoît Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. The agreement significantly enhances the scope and quality of Espacenet, the public patent information service on the EPO website, by adding an automatic translation tool. "With this agreement, Japan and the EPO have reached another milestone in their long-standing co‑operation to develop efficient structures and services in the international patent system", says EPO President Battistelli. "Making Japanese patents available in English not only brings a wealth of technological information to users in Europe and elsewhere. It also offers an effective and reliable way for engineers, inventors and scientists to take account of the latest Japanese technology when defining their intellectual property strategies, and thus improve the focus and quality of their own work."

GIVEN the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on "artificial intelligence" (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession.

WHEN it comes to the difficult problem of deciding who gets to keep the holiday home, the dog and the Barry Manilow albums, divorcing couples now have somewhere new to turn. Researchers in Australia have developed a computer program that relies on a branch of mathematics known as game theory to produce a fairer outcome when dividing property. Instead of the traditional approach of dividing a couple's property in half, the system, called Family Winner, guides the couple through a series of trade-offs and compensation strategies. According to John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, who developed the software with his colleague Emilia Bellucci, the results are fairer because both parties end up with what they value most. The software was tested last year on 50 divorcing couples, with the outcomes evaluated by Victoria Legal Aid.

Facebook could be in hot water over its facial recognition software. The social media giant is accused of violating users' privacy by collecting and storing biometric data without permission in order to make tagging suggestions. Facebook has argued to have the civil suit dismissed, but a US judge rejected this request. Facebook could be in hot water over its facial recognition software. The social media giant was accused of violating users' privacy by collecting and storing biometric data without permission in order to make tagging suggestions.

In the year since the European Court of Justice ruled that anyone can ask Google to remove personal information about them, the site has evaluated more than one million links. Each request has to be verified and processed by a dedicated team of people, but the sheer volume can cause delays. To speed this up, researchers from Germany and New Zealand have developed an algorithm capable of analysing hundreds of such requests in seconds. Oblivion (illustrated) allows a user to automatically find and tag their personal information on the web, using both text - or natural language processing (NLP) - and image recognition. And they hope to offer it to Google, and other search engines, to help them manage future demands.

With Intel's acquisition of the deep learning startup Nervana Systems on Monday, the chipmaker is moving further into artificial intelligence, a field that's become a key focus for tech companies in recent years. Intel's purchase of the company comes in the wake of Apple's acquisition of Seattle-based Turi Inc. last week, while Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, and Samsung have also made similar deals. Those purchases – large tech firms have bought 31 AI startups since 2011 – according to the research firm CB Insights, also underscore a shift. While AI was once thought of as a sci-fi concept, the technology behind it has come to propel a slew of innovations by hardware and software companies that both attract attention – like self-driving cars – and ones that often go unnoticed, like product recommendations on Amazon. "Intel's acquisition of [Nervana] is an acknowledgment that this area of deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, is really an important part of all companies going forward," says David Schubmehl, an analyst who focuses on the field at the research firm IDC. Intel also purchased Saffron Technologies, which aims to solve complex problems using "cognitive computing," last fall.

Current research projects include projects to investigate the use of multiple case representation and indexing schemes in precedent-based CBR, the effect of high level reasoning goals on supporting CBR tasks and vice versa in a mixed paradigm blackboard-based architecture, the use of CBR for generation of retrieval strategies in the context of information retrieval, and the automatic selection of parameters for dynamic scheduling problems.

UK robotics professor leading calls for a worldwide ban on autonomous weapons We can't rely on robots to conform to international law, says Noel Sharkey Sharkey is chairman of and NGO leading a campaign to "Stop Killer Robots" Autonomous robots could destabilize world security and trigger unintentional wars We can't rely on robots to conform to international law, says Noel Sharkey Sharkey is chairman of and NGO leading a campaign to "Stop Killer Robots" As wars become increasingly automated, we must ask ourselves how far we want to delegate responsibility to machines. Where do we want to draw the line? Weapons systems have been evolving for millennia and there have always been attempts to resist them. But does that mean that we should just sit back and accept our fate and hand over the ultimate responsibility for killing to machines? Over the last few months there has been an increasing debate about the use of fully autonomous robot weapons: armed robots that once launched can select their own targets and kill them without further human intervention.

It's been 25 years since "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" gave us nightmares about Skynet and liquid-metal assassin robots, and we're still freaking out about artificial intelligence breaking bad. Now Australian researchers are helping to resurrect fears of the movie's spooky T-1000 killing machine by developing self-propelled liquid metals reminiscent of the ones that made up its body. Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne plan to create elastic electronic components and soft-circuit systems that act more like live cells. For the most part, our modern electronics use fixed metallic tracks to create circuits that are stuck in a single configuration. This is why you can't simply ask Siri to split and rearrange your iPhone into four smaller iPods to share your music with friends.