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Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”

High-tech washing machines which contact users by EMAIL when the cycle is complete have been installed at a string of British universities.Makers believe the digital launderettes will mean students no longer lug their dirty laundry to the washing block only to find all the machines in use.The Laundryview machines, were first installed at Leeds University where students accessed a website to see if machines were free before taking their washing.Students then load the machine as normal but later receive an email when their washing finished and ready to collect. The scheme have proved so successful it's now been installed at 28 universities.

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