NEW YORK, June 6 Ray Bradbury, a giant of American literature who helped popularize science fiction with poetic, cerebral works such as "The Martian Chronicles," died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Bradbury brought not only futuristic vision but literary sensibilities to his more than 500 works published including "Fahrenheit 451," a classic dystopian novel about book censorship in a future society, and other favorites such as "The Illustrated Man" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Bradbury died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a long illness," said a spokesman for his publisher, HarperCollins, on Wednesday. As a science fiction writer, Bradbury said he did not want to predict the future -- but sometimes wanted to prevent it. Such was the case with "Fahrenheit 451," a book published in 1953 about a totalitarian, anti-intellectual society where banned books are burned by "firemen." The title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites. The novel, which Bradbury wrote on a rented typewriter at the UCLA library, featured a world that might sound familiar to 21st century readers -- wall-sized interactive televisions, earpiece communication systems, omnipresent advertising and political correctness. "In science fiction, we dream," he told The New York Times. "In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities ... to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required ... "Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present."

Artificial Life Researcher; Creator of Lucy, a Robot Babay Orangutan; Author, Creation: Life and How to Make It. Physicist, Universite' de la Mediterrane' (Marseille, France); Author: What is time?

I went to college thinking I was going to become a director or playwright. Somehow I became a designer instead. Recently my theatre background surfaced in an unlikely place: designing robots. As it turns out, bringing a character to life on stage, on screen, or even on the page has a lot in common with creating robots. Thinking of robots as characters is the fastest way to make them feel like beings, not machines.

It's said that there was a time when a well-educated individual could be an authority on all the most important areas of science, art and culture. Although that period, if it ever existed, is long passed, you can sometimes believe it's possible to re-enter it by listening, almost indiscriminately, to Radio 4. Did you know, for example, that the word "robot" comes from an old Slavonic word for slave or actually, more accurately, "forced labour"? That was one of the memorable facts recounted by Adam Rutherford in The Rise of the Robots. It was the Czech playwright Karel Čapek who introduced its modern meaning nearly 100 years ago in his play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). But as Rutherford noted, these "immigrants from the future" have been haunting the human imagination for much longer than that.

Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don't understand the meaning of language I'm afraid I can't do that." With chilling calm, HAL 9000, the on-board computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey", refuses to open the doors to Dave Bowman, an astronaut who had ventured outside the ship. HAL's decision to turn on his human companion reflected a wave of fear about intelligent computers. When the film came out in 1968, computers that could have proper conversations with humans seemed nearly as far away as manned flight to Jupiter. Since then, humankind has progressed quite a lot farther with building machines that it can talk to, and that can respond with something resembling natural speech. Even so, communication remains difficult. If "2001" had been made to reflect the state of today's language technology, the conversation might have gone something like this: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave.

It doesn't quite have the cachet of something like the Winston Cup (yet), but the Drone Racing League says its 2017 campaign will be called the Allianz World Championship Series. In another move cribbed from traditional motorsports, the drone pilots will have sponsors too. This season is airing on TV again with 12 hour long episodes that will come to ESPN/ESPN2. Those identical DRL Racer 2 drones will fly through 3D courses at more than 90mph, with the league promising bigger courses and faster drones this season. The action kicks off in June, but for now, there's a preview trailer to feast your eyes on.

Joab Rosenberg is the former deputy head analyst for the Israeli government and CEO of Epistema. Nature magazine announced in late January that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines? In November of last year, Dr. Kira Radinsky, a computer scientist and "machine learning" expert, argued in the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" that computers will be able to accurately predict the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We have seen a fast growing interest in current activities around AI startups and research in the last couple of months. Headlines like "2016 was the year AI came of age", "AI was everywhere in 2016", and "The Great A.I. Awakening" were all over the media in the ending weeks of 2016 and we are curious about what 2017 will bring. I found particularly interesting that the current applications, future potential, and possible risks even attracted interest beyond the tech community through TV shows like Westworld, coverage on traditional media and even Obama's farewell address. Sadly, for many of us tech enthusiasts here in Europe, we sometimes feel like there is way less movement on this side of the Atlantic than in the Silicon Valley. However, with major acquisitions like DeepMind, Magic Pony Technology, Movidius, Vision Factory, and Dark Blue Labs, Europe has shown that it is actually leading the way in AI and machine learning.

Netflix instant streaming is both one of the best and the worst products to be developed in the recent years. Best, because its helped make sitting at home for eight hours on a Saturday, binge watching the latest "water cooler TV" almost feel productive. The worst, because Netflix isn't smart enough (yet) to understand my mood and my general indecisiveness with "easy" decisions, I suffer from analysis paralysis when deciding what to watch. Should I watch something silly? Let me spend 20 minutes searching through a seemingly endless selection of mediocre movies I have never heard of eventually to settle on an episode of Arrested Development I've already seen 14 times.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. You may recognize some of the robots featured in this 10-minute overview of DLR's Robotics and Mechatronics Center: Rollin' Justin, Toro, LBR iiwa. But the one that caught our attention (starting at 5:40) is the super sleek ROboMObil vehicle.