From one of my favorites — Ray Hammond!
A pan-European team of robotics researchers begins a project this year that could see humanoid robots interact with groups of people in a realistic, anthropomorphic way for the first time.
If successful, the project will give future humanoid bots something that existing robots don’t possess – the simple social skills necessary to deal with small groups of people, including the basic intelligence to pick out a group of humans and determine which ones want to interact with it. It could also endow robots with the ability to infer meaning from incoming sense data, which would be a rudimentary step towards truly anthropomorphic robot intelligence.