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.

Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a multi-disc series of interviews with BBS pioneers than a documentary film as such, brought back to me my early years in personal computing and my subsequent forays into shareware software development through the mid-1990s. Now, Scott has tackled a subject from roughly the same era: the text adventure game. My involvement here was more peripheral but no less a part of my memories. As his new "Get Lamp" documentary recounts, the text adventure genre began with Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure game in the early 1970s, more commonly referred to as just Adventure.

The seeds of the film were sown by celebrated British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss in 1969 when he penned a futuristic tale of a child android given the capacity to love. The short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long set in motion a chain of events that lasted more than three decades and if the final result is considerably different from the origin of the species then one must consider the journey the original idea has taken. "I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now - they were lodged in laboratories," explains Aldiss from his Oxford home. "If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. "The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it - the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love.

To its credit the picture is a quite dark and disturbing story of an abandoned robotic child, the first in the world programmed to love, searching desperately to reunite with his adoptive human mother. The unequivocal winner in this film is 13-year-old actor Haley Joel Osment who gives an outstanding performance as David, the robotic child who can love. Osment appears in nearly every scene and his screen portrayal is every bit as riveting as his haunting performance in The Sixth Sense, which won him an Oscar nomination. Osment provides the emotional core to the story. Audiences may find they strongly connect with this Spielberg-fashioned child yearning for the unavailable love of his mother.

It seems that the robot designers are concentrating on things that are not priorities for potential consumers. Robots for the home will only be purchased when they can perform dull tasks properly without supervision. If I had the money to buy a robot to do the vacuum-cleaning, I wouldn't want to have to pay a cleaner to do the dusting as well; I'd want the robot to do it. Similarly a lawn-mowing robot would also need to be able to dig flower beds and remove weeds without damaging the plants I want to grow. The level of'hand-eye' coordination required for these simple tasks is beyond the capabilities of current robots and until that problem is solved no-one will be interested in whether they appear to have any empathy with humans, how they communicate or what they look like.