Now, though, the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism."

Tuesday marked the theatrical debut for the bot, which appeared onstage alongside real-life actors in a play that's being hailed as a first in robot-human artistic collaboration. Hataraku Watashi ("I, Worker"), by playwright Oriza Hirata, focuses on a couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work.

Our technology allows users to easily "embed" pictures, logos, and videos within their videos. Changing an existing video is as easy as uploading it, and making a few clicks. (Or choose a video from our library.)

All Hugh Loebner wanted to do was become world famous, eliminate all human toil, and get laid a lot. And he was willing to put up lots of good money to do so. He's a generous, fun-loving soul who likes to laugh, especially at himself. So why does everybody dislike him so much? Why does everybody give him such a hard time?

This Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) technology has the potential to allow computers to solve problems that are currently easily solved for humans but difficult or impossible to solve for machines.

Information scientists announced an agreement last month on a “concept bank” programmers could use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge—from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine.

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject and turn the results into books.

Jester uses a collaborative filtering algorithm called Eigentaste to recommend jokes to you based on your ratings of previous jokes.

The Spamalyzer is a computer program, based on the classic Eliza psychoanalyst conversation robot, that treats incoming spam as cries for help and publishes her responses in this advice column.

BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.