Our digital future isn’t all Facebook and iPhone apps. Meet the engineer behind Google X.

Hewlett-Packard is laying off 27,000 people. Yahoo is treading water. Facebook IPO shares got flipped and then flopped. Has Silicon Valley reached the end of the line? Will everyone just develop me-too iPhone apps?

I knew just the guy to prove otherwise.

The entrance to his building is littered with the gaudy red, blue, yellow and green bicycles that Googlers tool around on. I’m at the secret headquarters of the not-so-secret Google X, where the way-out-there projects of the search giant turn into reality. The gregarious play master, Sebastian Thrun, leads us into a well-worn conference room. The chairs are a shade of green not found in nature and the disrupting clang and cheers from a rousing foosball game waft in through the door. Mr. Thrun, 45 and slight in stature, is sporting a gray T-shirt of a local start-up and speaks softly with German-English diction.

“I feel I jump from an ocean liner and then learn how to swim,” he starts. Oh, this is going to be interesting.

Mr. Thrun earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Bonn, “the 53rd of 53 German computer-science schools,” he adds. His focus was on artificial intelligence, a field that failed in the 1980s with a rules-based approach—because humans could never come up with all the rules a machine needed—but then flourished in the mid-90s when machines had to learn the rules by themselves, by trial and error, almost like an infant.

Ken Fallin

Mr. Thrun left Germany in the mid-90s for Carnegie Mellon—looking “for the lack of authority, unlike Germany”—to build intelligent machines. His mentor at CMU, Tom Mitchell, told him, “Pick a problem that matters to society.” So he helped create robots, including a “nursebot” to assist the elderly in nursing homes and robotic tour guides, where one named Minerva led thousands of visitors during a stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. This required a cross-discipline education including nursing, psychology, material science and whatever else was required to help machines learn about the real world. These were hard projects, he says. “Just let go, trust your ability to learn, more [than] holding on to the things you’ve achieved—and that became the central theme in my life.”

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With major U.S. projects in the works, the high-output, low-profile designer talks Shaker chairs, Porsches and the best food in Milan

AT 55, Piero Lissoni has spent nearly three decades heading Lissoni Associati—his 70-member architecture and industrial design practice—while art directing the luxury brands Boffi, Porro and Living Divani. Based in Milan, Mr. Lissoni may be less known than fellow European design-minds like Philippe Starck or Marcel Wanders, but his projects, steeped in quiet elegance, bring order and beauty to the everyday. Black lacquer and gray oak elevate his Duemilaotto bath into a spare-yet-serene sanctuary. His modular Aprile kitchen for Boffi gracefully marries wood, steel and stone. Mr. Lissoni’s reach extends far beyond la casa, however. There are Paris, London and Istanbul flagship boutiques for Benetton, luxury suites for Taj hotels and showrooms for Piazza Sempione and Elie Tahari. The six-month-old Conservatorium Hotel, with vibrant modern interiors by Mr. Lissoni, has quickly become Amsterdam’s most stylish hideaway.

Mr. Lissoni’s Zooom table for Kartell

Now Mr. Lissoni is shifting his attention to America. This fall, he and business partner Nicoletta Canesi debut their first New York project, a Sky Lounge atop Times Square’s AKA Hotel. Next up: a residential building and waterfront hotel in Miami. While he was characteristically discreet about the details, the results will likely exhibit a sensitivity to site and surroundings. Mr. Lissoni’s work—whether a renovation of Milan’s 90-year-old Teatro Nazionale or the interiors for Jerusalem’s Mamilla Hotel—always attains a sense of place. “I only create buildings that are human in scale,” said the designer, an avid chef and dog-lover who travels 200 days each year. “Because there is a price to pay for every great piece of architecture.”

Italian design needs to be made in Italy. There’s something about Italian factories, manufacturers, entrepreneurs that cannot be replicated abroad.

Crockett & Jones shoe

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The daredevil mogul on why he breaks bread with his enemies and wants the necktie abolished

THERE ARE BUSINESS TRAVELERS—and there is Sir Richard Branson. The Virgin Group founder, known as much for his death-defying stunts in balloons and boats as for his ventures, spends much of his very busy life in transit. The entrepreneur zips between continents, projects and the extravagant sorts of leisure pursuits one would expect of the man who owns the grooviest airline in the skies.

Mr. Branson started building his global empire in the early 1970s with Virgin Records, known for launching bands like the Sex Pistols. Since selling the music company in 1992, his portfolio has expanded to include everything from wine to space travel. But he is probably best known for his airlines, which have been shaking up the industry since 1984, when a commercial flight he was on was canceled and he started selling seats on a plane he’d chartered to fellow passengers.

Necker Island

Mr. Branson has been criticized for his readiness to take the spotlight, but his personal style of branding has paid off handsomely. Lately, he has been investing his celebrity (and funds) in a variety of causes, among them saving endangered species and promoting peaceful conflict resolution through an organization called the Elders. We caught up with the British billionaire during a layover at New York’s JFK airport, where he recently launched a new Virgin Atlantic preflight clubhouse.

I keep copious notes. Notebooks have always been a critical part of my life. If I’m on a Virgin plane, I’ll get up and meet staff, meet passengers, get feedback and write things down.

When I’m on Necker Island [in the British Virgin Islands] about all I’ve got on is SPF—Sun Bum and also Island Company sun cream.

Every day is different, absolutely fascinating and a learning experience. In Canada, I’m trying to get legislation passed to save the polar bear. I’m going to Madagascar to try to save the lemur. Yesterday I was on stage with Amnesty International; today I’m doing a bit of business with Virgin Atlantic.

I hate being in hotels with a thousand rooms. And I personally don’t like going into hotels where you’ve got formal check-in desks. I’d much rather come and sit on the couch and be checked in that way, or ideally be checked in before I’ve actually gotten to the hotel.

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Thirty-five years after Alvy Singer obsessed over the universe’s inevitable expansion in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen is still grappling with the transience of life in his films. In “To Rome With Love,” which opens June 22, he co-stars as a reluctantly retired American opera director who tries to resurrect his former career by convincing his daughter’s future father-in-law—an Italian mortician who happens to sing well in the shower—that he could be a star.

The movie, the director’s 45th feature film, also marks Mr. Allen’s first appearance in front of the camera since 2006’s “Scoop,” in which he played a magician-turned-amateur-sleuth. “I’m too old now, is the problem. I like to get the girl,” said Mr. Allen, a spry 76, adding that his lack of credibility as a romantic lead “is a sad, terrible pill to swallow.”

In the film, the classic neurotic male role that a younger Mr. Allen would have snapped up for himself is that of Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), an architecture student who falls for Monica (Ellen Page), the charmingly crazy friend of his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig). Ms. Page’s character complains of “Ozymandias melancholia,” a bogus diagnosis inspired by a Shelley poem about an eroding monument. (Mr. Allen invented it for his character in 1980’s “Stardust Memories” but says he suffers from it, too.)

To distract himself from the fact that even great art will eventually fade into the past, Mr. Allen tries to stay focused on the present, making movies—one a year—watching sports, practicing clarinet and spending time with his family. He’s currently preparing to shoot his next movie in New York and San Francisco. In his editing room on New York’s Upper East Side, he spoke about why he’s making so many films in Europe, how he picks his actors and why his characters don’t text. An edited transcript:

How did you decide that you wanted to set your recent films in London, Paris, Rome or wherever?

Well, the Italians call and say, “We want to pay for it.” It’s strictly economics. It started with “Match Point.” I wrote that film, and it was originally going to be about a family in New York, in Long Island and Palm Beach. But it was expensive to do in New York. And they called me from London and said, “Would you like to make a movie here? We’ll pay for it.” And so I said, “Yes.” It was very easy to anglicize it. From then on, other countries call up and invite me to make movies, which is great because they don’t invite me in the United States. What happens in Europe, in South America, in China and Russia—all these countries call me and say, “Would you make a movie here if we financed it?”

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