Imagine a virtual computer simulation that reflects the world around you in real-time. Before you ever leave your home, a wealth of images and information about the world around you is at your finger-tips. Facial recognition might give information about the location of your friends, or maybe you want the latest scoop about the specials at local restaurants, or the real time locations and estimated arrival and departures of commuter trains. According to the Integrated Media Systems Center...

This video summarizes the development of ROILA, a spoken language for robots. It is constructed to make it easy for humans to learn, but also easy for the robots to understand. ROILA is optimized for the robots’ automatic speech recognition and understanding. The video also includes a demonstration of the language with a real robot.

Albert Einstein may have written his last scientific theory more than half a century ago, but he's still honing his emotional intelligence in a laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. Scientists at UC San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) have equipped a robot modeled after the famed theoretical physicist with specialized software that allows it to interact with humans in a relatively natural, conversational way.