The geniuses at the Personal Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University are working to humanize the movements and behavior of a personal-assistant robot. They want their robot to learn to recognize objects all by itself, as “naturally” as humans. Semantic Web brought this news to our attention in their article, “New Robot Has Semantic Learning Capabilities.”

This second robot-related story is right out of Star Trek and seems way too fictional to be true, but there are folks working on how to make an android that would look, talk, and respond like the character Dick from the 1982 novel, “We Can Build You.”

This interesting use, or not, of semantic technology caught my attention. Sometimes the accuracy of semantic analysis is in question and the topic in this specific situation could create even more suspicion. The students and professors at Humboldt State University avoided that by reading each of the 150,000 geo-coded tweets to produce a map revealing geographic differences in hate speech regarding, homophobia, racism, and specially-challenged topics.