Highlights from The Wall Street Journal:

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

After nearly three years and entries from more than 50,000 contestants, a multinational team says that it has met the requirements to win the million-dollar Netflix Prize: It developed powerful algorithms that improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix’s existing software by more than 10 percent.

A software engine that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages has been developed by researchers at the University of Washington. The tool extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words.

The Chinese game of Go has proven to be a tough challenge to those in the artificial intelligence field.  Advanced AI has been developed for many other games, with perhaps the most famous being chess. However, Go is in a different league all-together. The number of possible moves in the game is immense and dwarfs that of chess, with Go containing five times the number of board positions.

Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica, has been busy working on a next generation search product some say has the potential to be a game changer. Others think that this conclusion is a bit premature, but the Wolfram Alpha does show promise.

Researchers from the University of Maryland have been working on a next-generation surveillance system capable of detecting individuals carrying weapons.   The system analyzes the motion of passers-by and determines if there are any asymmetries in their gait.  If an asymmetry is found, the individual will be flagged as a possible threat, with the theory being that persons strapped with bombs or carrying other weapons will not walk in the same manner as the unencumbered.

The minds at IBM have decided the next challenge for one of their supercomputers will be to take on human competitors in the TV game show Jeopardy. It's been twelve long years since Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov and the IBMers have decided to re-enter the world of high profile human-computer competition with a new machine, code-named "Watson".

The goal of the FACETS project (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) is to design and develop a computer modeled after the human brain. Based out of Europe, the project takes advantage of biological nervous system design in order to achieve a computer capable of quickly tackling problems that have typically been easy for humans to solve but difficult for computers.

It seems like these days a majority of the developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence are in Weak AI - something like the logic used in Google searches or chess programs.  However, many people find Strong AI (also known as Artificial General Intelligence) a bit more interesting.  It's what most laymen think about when they hear the term 'Artificial Intelligence', having seen AGI portrayed in movies such as HAL from 2001 and Star Trek's Data.  For those of us interested in AGI, some good news: there's a new annual conference covering the topic of AGI, attended by members of both the business and academic communities.

A new search engine is being developed that utilizes ‘natural language’ searches rather than the familiar keyword based search used by Google, MSN and the other major search engines.

Dr. John Elliot of Leeds Metropolitan University has developed a computer program that may one day be helpful in translating alien languages.  The program is being trained to recognize patterns in human language, with the theory being that this will help in translating something as foreign as an alien language.