USATODAY.com - Domestic bliss through mechanical marvels?

At a recent conference here of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, robots competed to rescue dummies in a disaster mock-up, while a robot named George greeted attendees as they arrived. Dozens of teenagers -- a next generation of roboticists -- showed off their robot creations in a contest. Presentations by scientists ran from the esoteric ("Online Semantic Extraction by Backpropagation Neural Network with Various Syntactic Structure Representation" by Heidi Yeung of the City University of Hong Kong) to the practical topic du jour ("Intelligent Technology for Adaptive Aging," by the University of Michigan's Martha Pollack).