When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer. Brooks s lips are sealed, as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it s going to set a whole new direction in the field. Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich. These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT. 'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it.

The HoMT workshop at the University of Pennsylvania is a place for presenting work in progress, and this is such work. In the text below, I have omitted references, and mention of "the handout" doesn't mean anything here, except that I have linked to things on the handout that exist on the Web. If you'd like to correspond about the topic and correct or inform me about the use of print-based interfaces, please contact me: nickm at this domain. Update, 1 March 2004: I made several changes, thanks to comments from Tom Van Vleck, whose work I cite in my talk. Update, 20 August 2004: Further work on this topic has resulted in "Continuous Paper: Print Interfaces and Early Computer Writing," a talk given at ISEA. My topic today is what some call "electronic writing," although "computer writing" is also a reasonable term for it. "Electronic writing" makes this sound a bit like a quadraphonic hi-fi, while "computer writing" is something you might expect to find in PC Magazine -- the helpful advice column about defragmenting your hard disk and such.

In 2008, four students at the MIT Sloan School of Management developed a system for captioning online video that was far more efficient than traditional methods, which involve pausing a video frequently to write text and mark time codes. The system used automated speech-recognition software to produce "rough-draft" transcripts, displayed on a simple interface, that could easily be edited. Landing a gig to caption videos from five MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) classes, the students were able to caption 100 hours of content in a fraction the time of manual captioning. This marked the beginning of captioning-service company 3Play Media, which now boasts more than 1,000 clients and an equal number of contracted editors processing hundreds of hours of content per day. Clients include academic institutions, government agencies, and big-name companies -- such as Netflix, Viacom, and Time Warner Cable -- as well as many users of video-sharing websites.

As he looks down into its big, dark eyes, it turns its head towards him and blinks, looking contented as it curls a bony white finger around his hand. But the "baby" is not human. And it looks more like Gollum from "The Lord Of The Rings" wearing a hemp romper suit, than a gurgly infant. Meet Heart Robot, a flexible, plastic puppet with robotic features that has been programmed to react to sound, touch and nearby movements. Heart Robot, so called because its red "heart" is visible on the left side of its body and beats at different rates, is certainly getting more attention than its menacing-looking counterpart, iC Hexapod, nearby.

Peck and his team asked study participants to wear headbands fitted with two functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) probes that measured activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that plays a critical role in the emotion and reasoning behind decision-making. Each person was given a list of films culled from IMDB's lineup of the 250 best movies and the 100 worst movies and asked to pick the top and bottom three movies. The participants were then shown slides of each selection, while the fNIRS probes measured the person's neural patterns that correlated with preference and opposition. "We try to get an idea of what the patterns in the brain look like for things they like or don't like," said Peck. Preference patterns were then fed into a brain-computer recommendation system -- a series of filters and machine-learning algorithms -- that interpreted those patterns to make recommendations as subjects watched a fresh series of movie slides.

Of course, no discussion of 2015 science fiction movies would be complete without mention of this year's modest little endeavor from Disney/Lucasarts: On the meta level, the film doesn't have much direct conjecture on contemporary technology -- everything happened a long time ago, after all, in a galaxy far, far away. Plus, "Star Wars" has always been more about space fantasy than hard sci-fi, anyway. But those interested in the "soft sciences" of sociology and anthropology will find plenty to chew on. The movie is basically a masterclass on how mythology works -- how we tell ourselves the same story, over and over, in different times and places. The year's second-tier sci-fi films had some lessons to impart as well.

"Secret Thoughts," a play by British novelist and playwright David Lodge, is introducing audiences to a hot new actor--Arthur the robot. Arthur comes onstage for about 20 seconds, scans the room, and collides with furniture in the production, which is described as "science against art, and morality against indulgence." In it, Ralph, a married, groundbreaking cognitive scientist, meets Helen, a recently bereaved novelist, and "sparks fly" (presumably not from the robot short-circuiting). It's really just a walk-on (roll-on) part for the remote-controlled bot, who's made mostly of fiberglass. But it leads to a pivotal conversation between the characters about the emotional intelligence of robots.

Just when you thought you might be able to outrun the Cougar20-H surveillance robot that can detect human breathing, developer TiaLinx has launched a flying version that can do the same. The Phoenix40-A is a mini-UAV with six rotors that can detect motion and breathing when searching for hidden people. Like the Cougar20-H, it has an ultra-wideband radio frequency sensor array and can also detect motionless live objects. It also has video cameras for site surveillance. Developed with U.S. Army funding, the Phoenix unmanned aerial vehicle can be remotely controlled from ground or air with a laptop or joystick, and can fly to multiple GPS points on its missions.

With child-like eyes staring out from an expressionless face, the Telenoid R1 does look a little creepy. But if Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Japan's Osaka University has his way, a miniature Telenoid that lets you "feel" the presence of the party on the other line could soon replace the cell phones of today. It turns out the future could be just around the corner as the roboticist said a prototype of the mobile "Elfoid" would be ready in a few months. Speaking today at the sneak preview of the Singapore-based Asia on the Edge festival--an annual showcase of ideas and cultures from Asia--Ishiguro is most regarded for his development of lifelike androids. He has even created a mechanical doppelganger of himself called Geminoid in his bid to understand humans.