A super-intelligent robotic "brain" that can learn new skills by browsing millions of web pages has been developed by US researchers. Robo Brain is designed to acquire a vast range of skills and knowledge from publicly available information sources such as YouTube. The information it learns can then be accessed by robots around the world, helping them to perform everyday tasks. A similar project is already being developed in Europe. RoboEarth, described as a world wide web for robots, was demonstrated by researchers at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands in January.

Computers are good at identifying patterns in huge data sets. Humans, by contrast, are good at inferring patterns from just a few examples. In a paper appearing at the Neural Information Processing Society's conference next week, MIT researchers present a new system that bridges these two ways of processing information, so that humans and computers can collaborate to make better decisions. The system learns to make judgments by crunching data but distills what it learns into simple examples. In experiments, human subjects using the system were more than 20 percent better at classification tasks than those using a similar system based on existing algorithms.