It also poses fundamental philosophical, ethical and legal questions. How can these machines operate safely and efficiently in the human world, with all its dynamism, uncertainty and complexity? The Canada Excellence Research Chair in Human-Centred Robotics and Machine Intelligence will launch an formidable multidisciplinary analysis program, integrating theory, computation and experiment. Large-scale sequencing of the human genome opens up unprecedented opportunities to identify and validate new drug targets and to accelerate and improve the probability of success for drug development.