Every age has its iconic images. One of the more terrifying ones of the 21st century is the image of a man in desert or army fatigues making a "V for victory" sign with raised arm while standing over the decapitated body of a Western victim. In most of these images, the perpetrator's face and head are covered with a scarf or hood to hide his identity. That has forced military and law enforcement agencies to identify these individuals in other ways, such as with voice identification. This is not always easy or straightforward, so there is significant interest in finding new ways.

We all know that alcohol and tweeting is not always a good combination. Yet a surprising number of us indulge in this peculiar form of indiscretion. And this practice has given Nabil Hossain and pals at the University of Rochester an interesting idea. Today, these guys show how they've trained a machine to spot alcohol-related tweets. And they also show how to use this data to monitor alcohol-related activity and the way it is distributed throughout society.

For example, Dean's affinity for cats comes in handy with his line of work. In this context, cats are a mere vehicle for determining how much a computer can see, learn, communicate and understand. It also turns out that machines and humans are complementary in skills. While some computers are capable of beating a human opponent in a game such as Go, it's challenging for the same computers to perform more interpretive functions such as identifying and describing images. On the other hand, humans (and cats) are challenged by performing algorithmic functions on large sets of data, a task at that machines excel at.

For outsiders, the idea of artificial intelligence in the court room sounds horrifying. AI, however, has been pushing its way into law for decades. The next time you apply to claim child benefits, you may be met with the unexpected: robots. Most might not even notice it, but the future of law is heavily tied to Artificial Intelligence. In fact, the slow integration of AI into the legal sphere has been happening for decades, and several magazines, news sources and committees have been built around the topic.

South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol is now down 0-2 to Google DeepMind's AlphaGo which is on the verge of a milestone achievement in artificial intelligence. Master Se-dol has expressed surprise and amazement at the sophistication and skill of his virtual opponent. It has taken a long time to get here. Games have long been an attractive development tool for artificial intelligence researchers. In 1994, a computer program excelled at checkers and in 1997 it was chess.

At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation. The company admits it employs a small kitchen staff, and one employee is present in the front of the house, answering questions about how to order and dodging questions about what's going on behind the wall of magic cubbies.

Author, inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil has accurately predicted the rise of major technological innovations, from head-mounted displays such as Google Glass to natural language interfaces such as Siri. Speaking Feb. 20 at the annual MIT Tech Conference, Kurzweil offered a vision of 2030, one with nanorobots bolstering the immune system and also connecting to external, cloud-based neocortal modules, or groups of neurons, to access far more knowledge than can fit in the brain. "We have pretty good ideas of how this works," said Kurzweil, who detailed this process in his 2012 book, How to Create a Mind. The thought of nanorobots inside the body fighting disease and connecting to computers may seem far-fetched. But so did, at one time, the World Wide Web, the mobile phone, the 3-D printer, and the fully mapped human genome--all of which Kurzweil also foresaw.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (sixth in a series of seven) is a look at robotics. Be sure to read the first five posts if you haven't already: When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know Drones Have Reached at Tipping Point--Here's What Happens Next How 3D Printing Is Transforming the Way We Make Things An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., 3D Printing), but try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, drones, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining…You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This post is the result of an interview with Rodney Brooks on the top five recent robotics breakthroughs (2012-2015) and the top five anticipated robotics breakthroughs (2016-2018). Rodney is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence technology are raising ethical questions, as pointed out by Dr Jason Millar ("The momentous advance in artificial intelligence demands a new set of ethics", Comment). He asks whether it is desirable to develop autonomous systems that operate beyond human control. Other ethical dilemmas may arise sooner than we think. While many have poured scorn on the idea that robots could possess consciousness, if consciousness can be interpreted as an algorithm – a series of logical cause-and-effect statements – then, because the output of an algorithm is platform-independent, there is no reason in principle why that algorithm should not operate in a robot. There is a debate as to whether brain activity is algorithmic, but other forms of biological information processing are and there is no convincing evidence to the contrary.

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. I've never seen a human play this move," he says. It's a word he keeps repeating. The move in question was the 37th in the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world's top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by researchers at Google.