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    Courtesy of New Scientist Magazine By Duncan Graham-Rowe THE YOUNGSTER EYES ME suspiciously as I enter the room, its gaze following as I cross the floor. Then after a while, it loses interest and turns back to its toy dinosaur. But then I never was any good with kids. When Rodney Brooks set out to build a humanoid robot with the intelligence of a two-year-old child, he didn't realize what he was letting himself in for. Six years later, he and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have transformed themselves from artificial intelligence (AI) experts into the most unlikely bunch of developmental psychologists and nannies. Colorful toys litter the labs, and much of their time is spent playing with and entertaining their charges. This is because Cog and its alter ego Kismet are the first of a new type of robot designed to behave in the same way as small children. If you want to create a robot with the intelligence of a t

• Joaquín Almunia , vice-president of the European commission, was named as a surveillance target. He said he was "strongly upset" about being spied on and did not know what the intelligence services were after. "This piece of news follows a series of other revelations which, as we clearly stated in the past, if proven true, are unacceptable and deserve our strongest condemnation," said Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, European Commission spokesperson . • At his final press conference of the year, US president Barack Obama addressed the White House review panel report on NSA surveillance, which was released on Wednesday . "I'm going to make a pretty definitive statement about this in January," Obama said . He also refused to comment on whether he would consider granting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden amnesty. Snowden has been indicted by the US government. • The UK executive director of Médecins du Monde , Leigh Daynes, said he was "bewildered"

Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the most exciting field in robotics. It's certainly the most controversial: Everybody agrees that a robot can work in an assembly line, but there's no consensus on whether a robot can ever be intelligent. Like the term "robot" itself, artificial intelligence is hard to define. Ultimate AI would be a recreation of the human thought process -- a man-made machine with our intellectual abilities. This would include the ability to learn just about anything, the ability to reason, the ability to use language and the ability to formulate original ideas. Roboticists are nowhere near achieving this level of artificial intelligence, but they have made a lot of progress with more limited AI. Today's AI machines can replicate some specific elements of intellectual ability. Computers can already solve problems in limited realms. The basic idea of AI problem-solving is very simple, though its execution is complicated. First, the AI