Past, Present and Future? of AI

I just read this article (http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/the-past-present-and-future-of-ai-643838) about AI. It's a good read, but it focuses on the popular idea of AI from its humble beginnings. Nothing in here about planning, preference representation, or relational Bayes' nets. The article does at least acknowledge the disconnect between "Hollywood" AI and real AI research--something lacking in most mainstream coverage of AI.

Lisp type philosophy catching on fast

I have noticed this new trend where the advantages of pure functional programming are filtering into newer languages in the main stream. One specific pivot point is concurrency and scalability. The paradigm of how immutability==high concurrency==scalability is being replicated in multiple ways, first map reduce now this. Its high time the goodness of lisp like languages was not restricted due to its esoteric coding style ...
http://blog.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/09/scala-vs-clojure-lets-get-down-to-business/

Human-Aware AI: Robots that "show emotion"

This great talk on TED by David Hanson talks about robots and robot faces that interface with humans and are able to show, among other things, empathy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_hanson_robots_that_relate_to_you.html

Stanford's Autonomous Helicopter Project

Here's a link to Stanford's autonomous helicopter project, part of which Andrew Ng showcased at IJCAI 2009 during his Computers & Thought Award lecture.

http://heli.stanford.edu/

Remember, this helicopter is completely autonomous :)