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Are robots capable of committing crime? Yes, says Christopher Markou, PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law, writing for ̽��ֱ��Conversation - but what should we do if it does?

Fumiya Iida (Department of Engineering) discusses the "mother" robot he has built with his colleagues, and why reacting to developments in robotics with undue fear could stifle research and creativity.

Researchers have observed the process of evolution by natural selection at work in robots, by constructing a ‘mother’ robot that can design, build and test its own ‘children’, and then use the results to improve the performance of the next generation, without relying on computer simulation or human intervention. 

Eve, an artificially-intelligent ‘robot scientist’ could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. ̽��ֱ��team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.

Robots can do a lot for us: they can explore space or they can cut our toenails. But do advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold hidden threats? Three leaders in their fields answer questions about our relationships with robots.

“Do we actually want machines to interact with humans in an emotional way? Will it be possible for them to interact with us?”