Depending upon your age you may think of a robot as Robbie from Lost in Space or Data from Star Trek. But either way these are still charaters on the TV and artificial intellegence (AI) is still a foriegn concept to most people. AI has slowly been sneeking up on us while we weren't looking. If you are reading this note you are familiar with Google. Google and many of the other technologies we see on the web are based on AI. But these are still not the personal AI assistant that many people have imagined. But there is progress. Researchers at Britain's University of Leeds have developed a system that teaches itself to play games by observing human players. Most AI systems work on a set of rules that are presented to the computer by the human user. Human's on the other hand learn by observation. Now we have a computer that learns like a human. Check out the article in "New Scientist" at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6914.

On another front, researchers at Austrailia's Swinburne University are working on computer generted avatar's that could sit in for you on your next conference call...