When the Office of Emergency Management in Bergen County, New Jersey, went shopping for a drone, it had a few criteria. The platform had to be robust and capable of rapid deployment in emergency situations. It also had to be dead easy to use, even on complex missions, and completely secure. Nothing spells'lawsuit' like a renegade drone with "Property of Bergen County" printed on the side. The dilemma facing the Bergen County procurement team is one that law enforcement and emergency response agencies all over the country, and indeed the world, are confronting as drones become standard kit in the sector.

Think Portugal's maritime mastery is a thing of the past? A team of researchers from the Institute of Telecommunications at University Institute of Lisbon and from University of Lisbon in Portugal are the first to demonstrate a swarm of intelligent aquatic surface robots in a real-world environment. A video describing the team's work has been nominated for "Best Robot Video Award" at the prestigious Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) video competition: "Swarm robotics is a paradigm shift," says Dr. Anders Christensen, the principal investigator on the project. "We rely on many small, simple and inexpensive robots, instead of a single or a few large, complex and expensive robots." Swarms have the potential to scale to hundreds or thousands of robots and cover large areas, making them ideal for tasks such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and maritime surveillance.

Microsoft's intelligent assistant, Cortana, is coming to iOS and Android devices, according to a Reuters report published today. But don't expect Siri to step aside right away. The Reuters report, based on interviews with Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, and unnamed sources, is frustratingly vague about the timeframe for the appearance of Cortana in standalone apps on non-Windows platforms. Horvitz told Reuters that technology from an artificial intelligence project codenamed Einstein, "will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame." The standalone apps for iOS and Android are due "later," according to Reuters.

Late last week, NASA delivered a version of its six-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoid to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In November, NASA announced that it would give one Valkyrie humanoid, also called R5, to MIT and one to Northeastern University, along with $250,000 each, to advance the capabilities of the massively complex system. Valkyrie had a disappointing showing at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge trials and didn't qualify for the finals, so its makers are looking for some outside help to get the robot, which has cost about $6M to develop so far, closer to mission-ready. The space agency hopes R5 will serve on long haul space missions, including those to Mars, both independently and alongside crew. A team of CSAIL researchers will program their new toy to autonomously perform a variety of tasks that would allow it to help or even replace astronauts on missions.

Mobile robots can help chronically ill children regain part of the normal school experience. Some kids are unable to attend school for months or even years due to symptoms, treatments, or recovery from serious illness. These homebound children typically continue their education by having make-up work sent home and (depending on resources) studying with tutors for a few hours each week. But they miss out on a key aspect of school: socialization. With today's technology, the definition of face time has changed.

Be careful what you wish for. Digital 2.0 increasingly allows automation of human based tasks through Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning and AI. We are all impacted and some municipalities are even trialling "money for nothing" distribution to their citizens. Is Digital 2.0 the brave new world we seek and how do we respond to the business opportunity while managing the threats to our own professions? Through rapid advances in technology we are now witnessing Digital 2.0 through an explosion of big data, the availability of cheap compute power and algorithmic developments using machine learning.

When you think about it, not a lot has changed in the legal world from the days of To Kill A Mockingbird to the latest John Grisham thriller. Sure, literature snobs may insist that Atticus Finch's flawless moral heroism should never be compared to the conflicted protagonists of contemporary legal page-turners, but in terms of the substance of how lawyers do their lawyering, the fundamentals have barely changed in 80 years, from the career track of a young lawyer to the set-up of a law firm. The same cannot be said of virtually any other profession. Indeed, the legal industry seems more dusty than dynamic; the robes and wrinkles that mark those at the top of the field hardly scream modernity. But change is afoot, as a couple of powerful market forces are driving law firms to adopt modern corporate efficiency.

I haven't seen you around, are you new here? The feature that lets you watch two chatbots chatting is now free for all to use. Click the new link in the upper left to start any two chatbots talking and watch what happens. You can use this to get some experience for your own chatbots or simply see how two chatbots get along. This feature is available in your Bot Workshop as well.

If while watching the video you would like to step through the examples yourself in order to better learn NeuroSolutions, you will first want to download a zip of the sample data. Of course, you would also need to download and install a copy of NeuroSolutions if you have not done so already.