Last Saturday, the New York Times Magazine published the fourth installment in its “Smarter Than You Think” series, this one titled “Students, Meet your New Teacher, Mr. Robot.” The article highlights the use of robots as teachers of young students. Imbued with boundless patience and ability to recall facts, robots hold promise as effective teachers in high-repetition scenarios such as language class autism therapy. Teams from UCSD, MIT, UConn, etc., are field-testing teaching robots for a variety of uses. The results of these tests have been positive and the future use of robots in the classroom seems likely. The article also discusses the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence — teaching […]

Peter Lee, a past member of the CCC Council and the PI of the first CIFellows Project, today was named the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond, effective this fall. In joining Microsoft Research, Peter departs DARPA, where he has been the Director of the agency’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO) for the past year. There Peter has challenged conventional Department of Defense (DoD) approaches to computer science research by infusing new energy into [DARPA]’s relationships with academia and industry and reinforcing the agency’s unique role at the intersection of research and application. Today, TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas […]

Last week Amy Harmon wrote the third installment of the awesome New York Times Magazine series “Smarter Than You Think.” The article, titled ‘Discovering a Soft Sport for Circuitry – Robot Machines as Companions,’ details the use of artificial intelligent machines as human companions. In particular, the article highlights Paro — a robotic baby harp seal — used in nursing homes as a therapeutic aid for the elderly. Paro uses 14 different sensors, two microprocessors, and a whole slew of AI algorithms to illicit compassionate responses from users and convincingly behave as a real-life animal. The Paro robot is used to help patients suffering with dementia and provide comfort in […]

I’m trying to compile a list of major technological and societal trends that influence computing research.  Here’s my list.  Please post your own suggestions! Recent technological and societal trends Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!), and from the creation of all information in digital form – has led to a torrent of data which must be transferred, stored, and mined:  “data to knowledge to action” Social computing – the way people interact has been transformed; the data we have from and about people is transforming All transactions […]

A workshop entitled “What Now in Instruction-Level Parallelism Research?” will be held on September 20-21, 2010 in Seattle, WA.  While we encourage you to submit a position paper to this workshop, you are also encouraged to post your thoughts right here on this blog! Historically, the computing industry has been driven by a set of exponential increases in single-thread performance. The ubiquity of multi-cores and the fact that much of the IT industry is relying on main-streaming parallel processing for survival is a truly seismic event. At the same time, there remains a huge gap between the theoretical limits of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and what processors actually attain. Novel techniques […]

NSF/CISE has just announced a new program at the Interface between Computer Science and Economics & Social Science (ICES): Computational thinking has the potential to change the types of questions considered by social and economic scientists. For example, Nash (and other) equilibria lie at the heart of theories about the behavior of economic agents. Computational thinking can help characterize the range and robustness of possible equilibria and markets for which the computation of equilibria is intractable. Theories of strategic learning by computational agents, studied both in economics and computer science, can shed light on the dynamics of how agents arrive at equilibria. Theories of the spread of contagion or gossip […]