The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

In the summer of 2015, we launched a new funding scheme called the Pioneer Award, to support innovative science. We're encouraging researchers to think big – the sky is the limit – and bring with them new ideas that could be game-changing for cancer research. To quickly recap on how this new scheme works, it's a'Dragon's Den'-like way of funding research: applications are judged anonymously, and short-listed researchers are given five minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts. There's a pot of up to 200,000 to those who succeed. Back in December, we unveiled the first round of successful projects, and now we have the next batch of bright ideas.

Schools are on the front lines in coping with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). More school-age kids are getting diagnosed with it each year (more than one in 10, according to the most recent National Survey of Children's Health) and the classroom is where kids often have their biggest problems with impulse control and an inability to sit still and focus. Some kids take medicine to control these symptoms, but many do not. And so principals and teachers are tremendously interested in non-medical therapies they can use at school to help children. Fortunately, it's an exciting time in ADHD research, thanks to developments in neuroscience, and psychologists hope they will find new tools for schools.

In the first years of her career in brain research, Beth Stevens thought of microglia with annoyance if she thought of them at all. When she gazed into a microscope and saw these ubiquitous cells with their spidery tentacles, she did what most neuroscientists had been doing for generations: she looked right past them and focused on the rest of the brain tissue, just as you might look through specks of dirt on a windshield. "What are they doing there?" she thought. Stevens never would have guessed that just a few years later, she would be running a laboratory at Harvard and Boston's Children's Hospital devoted to the study of these obscure little clumps. Or that she would be arguing in the world's top scientific journals that microglia might hold the key to understanding not just normal brain development but also what causes Alzheimer's, Huntington's, autism, schizophrenia, and other intractable brain disorders. Microglia are part of a larger class of cells--known collectively as glia--that carry out an array of functions in the brain, guiding its development and serving as its immune system by gobbling up diseased or damaged cells and carting away debris. Along with her frequent collaborator and mentor, Stanford biologist Ben Barres, and a growing cadre of other scientists, Stevens, 45, is showing that these long-overlooked cells are more than mere support workers for the neurons they surround.

It's by now a given that one of the best ways to eat better, whether that means consuming less calories and-or more vegetables and-or whatever, is to just actually pay attention to what we eat. This is the big secret behind dieting--any old fad diet is probably going to have a positive effect simply because the dieter is paying more attention to what they put into their face. And just by virtue of paying attention, they will probably eat healthier. The fad diet usually gets the credit, but just caring at all goes a very long way. Paying attention is hard, however.

In recent years however, information technology has entered the field of international politics gaming and made some major contributions. The most successful international politics games at present are concerned with the personalities of political adversaries. An interesting international politics game could define personality in several variables including concepts like aggressiveness, nastiness, and paranoia. Computer programs would allow then the international politics gamer to vary personalities by ascribing a different numerical value to each of these variables. In this way, an infinite number of different "artificial" personalities can be created by means of using concepts like heuristics, algorithms, fuzzy logic, statistics, neural networks, and virtual reality.

Though we try, these moments tend to occur when we've taken an unexpected turn; when we've planned for option A, and another opportunity comes out of left field. Looking back at these crossroads, it's not always clear whether we found the path, or whether it found us. Just a month before the 2015 Graduate Studies Program (GSP) kicked off, Andrea graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a degree in mechanical engineering. Earlier in the year, she won Singularity University's Canadian Global Impact Competition (and the chance to attend GSP) by submitting a wearable device she developed to help predict meltdowns of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, before they occur. But Andrea hadn't always wanted to be an engineer or go to Singularity University.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

A Weird Month for Artificial Intelligence Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM.

She was supposed to come off as a normal teenage girl. But less than a day after her debut on Twitter, Microsoft's chatbot--an AI system called "Tay.ai"--unexpectedly turned into a Hitler-loving, feminist-bashing troll. TechRepublic turns to the AI experts for insight into what happened and how we can learn from it. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.