"Big science" (and technology) are very conservative

Because of the long lead time (designs must be finalized years or even decades in advance of use) and high price tags (multi billion dollars at risk) you won't see the very latest ideas in robotics in use on Mars nor the newest techniques in plasma science deployed on the ITER.  Rather, the newest work is confined to the university laboratories.

DeSTIN

Itamar Arel, et al's DeSTIN architecture is quite similar to my Asa H.  It complements my work on Asa H since it makes use of Bayesian statistics.

A feature discovery heuristic

Search for patterns localized in space and/or time.  Temporal localization can be accomplished using the temporal sequence heirarchy built into Asa H (see my Trans. of the Kansas Academy of Science 2006 paper on Asa H). Temporal patterns are of various durations; i.e., of various scales.  Higher levels in the hierarchy record longer duration patterns. Spatial localization can be accomplished by deviding the visual field into a grid of cells.  Each cell contains a set of points in 2-D.  Patterns are learned over the points in each of these cells.  The cells can be overlapped and cells can be of various different sizes.

Advanced life forms

I have argued in favor of mechanical life (see my blog of 19 Oct. 2010). This can be engineered rather than an evolutionary kludge. (There would be no vestigial organs, etc.) In addition to repairing components or "melting them down," the fusion torch (Eastlund and Gough, WASH 1132, 15 May 1969) would create a fully closed matter cycle; mechanical life need not input new matter ("food") nor output any waste matter. In addition to chemical energy mechanical life could make use of nuclear (or other) energy, performing larger amounts of work than is possible with present-day ("natural") biological organisms. Mechanical life forms would be super organisms.

If space aliens are capable of traveling to earth we might expect them to be of this sort. (Because of the high energy demands for relativistic travel I assume these should be as small/light as possible.)

All knowledge is uncertain

The majority of published scientific papers are wrong (J. P. A. Ioannidis, PLoS Med, 2(8), 30 Aug 2005).  We must just do the best that we can.  (Science is still better than business where the majority of companies fail in 3 to 5 years and 90% of companies fail in 10 years.)

Soccer

Soccer is too low scoring.  I suggest that the goal be made bigger. Or will there be too many corner kicks?

Vector value in the human nervous system

I have argued that utility/value should be a vector quantity.  (My post of 19 Feb. 2011, my website,
http://www.robert-w-jones.com/, philosopher, axiology, and references therein) Schultz (J. of Neurophysiology, 80: 1-27, 1998) notes that the responses of most dopaminergic neurons are similar, suggesting that this system carries a scalar signal.  Schultz and Romo, however, (J. of Neurophysiology, 63: 607-624, 1990)
report that different goups of neurons display both excitatory and inhibitory responses to the very same situation.  This would suggest vector reward signaling. (see the 2003 PhD thesis of Nathaniel Daw, Carnegie Mellon school of computer science)