For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language, with all its messiness, subtle context, humor, and irony. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms. The ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary.

IBM hopes to advance toward this objective with Watson, a computer system that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup--complete with hosting by the show's Alex Trebek--sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

MPEG-7, formally named "Multimedia Content Description Interface", is a standard for describing the multimedia content data that supports some degree of interpretation of the information meaning, which can be passed onto, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. MPEG-7 is not aimed at any one application in particular; rather, the elements that MPEG-7 standardizes support as broad a range of applications as possible.

These days robot-loving Japanese are tinkering with screwdrivers and motors instead of heading to the beach or hot springs during the holidays. Tokyo's major store devoted to robots, Vstone Robot Center in the bustling Akihabara electronics district, sells robots of all sizes and shapes, including the tiny scuttling Robo-Q from Tomy Co. and the Pleo animatronic dinosaur toy from Ugobe Inc. of the U.S.

Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other.

Should Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage that flaws in its software have caused around the world? It might have to, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law. Although that sounds an appealing prospect, one knock-on consequence could be that open source coders would also be liable for any damage that errors in their software caused. Here's what the European Commission is proposing:

Kurzweil’s successes at technological and social forecasting are highlighted (he correctly predicted the rise of the Internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the year that a computer would defeat a human champion at chess, and the list goes on and on), and the Singularity – which he forecasts for 2045 – is presented as his latest and greatest prediction, resulting from a painstaking process of data analysis covering technology trends in computer technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI and other areas.

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

You can take the train to work, but your office is still a mile away from the station. Might as well drive, right? How we can solve the last-mile problem.

Firecoral’s goal is to scale web content distribution to end users by allowing mutually distrustful users to share their web browser caches, yet ensure the authenticity of content and enable users to preserve privacy by expressing flexible content sharing policies. To achieve these goals, we have built a Firefox extension that uses subscription-based XPath queries to extract URLs from web sites and redirect them to a proxy server running inside the browser.