Home robot industry was on the rise during the last twelve months. We described what is currently available on the market, starting with specialized lawn mowing and vacuuming robots, and finishing with more powerful and sophisticated (while not always more expensive) universal home robots: Cye, CareBot PCR, and PeopleBot. However, if you are not impressed with vacuuming and lawnmowing robots, iRobot Corporation considers the virtual teleportation (being able to project yourself into a physical avatar and do the types of things you would do if you were there) as the first killer application for home robots. After numerous successful (and expensive) real-world devices, they brought us the first multipurpose home robot controllable from a Web browser: iRobot.

Peer-to-peer computing continued to gain popularity. We are all familiar with Napster, popular music-sharing system and Gnutella, similar but decentralized distributed file exchange system. The next step will be to combine the processing power of thousands of networked personal computers to create a worldwide virtual supercomputer. Several research labs and commercial ventures are working on a concept of "computing grid", developing services and software that can manage complex physical systems of disparate, geographically separated resources. They are laying foundation for a new class of applications that need vast computing power - undoubtedly, quite a few AI-related projects will benefit greatly from this concept. The archetypal idea of the "global brain" - an emergent, distributed worldwide intelligence - is also gaining more popularity these days. Several related projects were described in an article titled "World Wide Brain".

People interested in developing comparison shopping engines, intelligent search agents and assistants, specialized meta-search engines and similar services finally got several decent development tools. Our Special Report on data extracting tools covers Dextr's Data Extractor, REBOL, Web Language, World Wide Web Wrapper Factory , etc. Earlier this year we saw announcements for NQL, a reliable language/tool for rapid and simple development of intelligent agents, bots, spiders, middleware and scalable business to business content aggregation applications. With its support for advanced AI techniques like fuzzy processing and neural networks, it was a quite pleasant surprise - disregarding the high price, of course.

Several companies launched various software packages that allows you to perform complex financial forecasting and similar operations without leaving you lost in the state-of-the-art AI technology. NeuroShell Trader from Ward Systems Group, Inc., BioComp Profit from BioComp Systems and TradingSolutions from from NeuroDimension, Inc.don't require of you to be an expert in both neural networks and professional trading to produce useful results.

Contrary to the industry cliché that Artificial Intelligence did not fulfilled people's expectations, I believe it has succeeded as a part of a big picture - technology buried inside other tools and products. We talked about ubiquitous computing - concept that will enable us 'to do more by doing less' by stretching the limits of human-computer interaction. The primary goal of the Project Oxygen, for example, is to develop computers that will be freely available everywhere, like oxygen in the air we breathe. Some of the enabling technologies for smart homes, smart clothes, smart cars, etc. are already here. More "human" interfaces are especially important: we saw various, more or less successful tools for building chatterbots and other types of natural language interfaces. Speech recognition has been one of the most successful examples of the "applied" AI. VoiceXML, an emerging standard founded by AT&T;, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, and IBM promises to give a boost to the voice-based Web applications. Biometrics - a term which describes automated methods of establishing someone's identity from their unique physiological or behavioral characteristics - became very attractive to developers and end users. We covered face recognition and similar technologies in one of the last articles in this year...