The following is a special contribution to this blog by Ashok Goel, Associate Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the School of Interactive Computing and Director of the Digital Intelligence Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Ashok attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on AI and Sustainable Design in Palo Alto, CA, last month. Computational sustainability is becoming big in artificial intelligence (AI) research. For the first time ever, this year AAAI is organizing a special track on computational sustainability as part of its annual National Conference on AI. In addition, this year AAAI held a spring symposium on AI and sustainable design, organized by Doug Fisher (Vanderbilt Univerity) and Mary Lou Maher (University of Maryland […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft in February 2010, facilitating free access to the Windows Azure cloud computing platform for select research teams. Today, CISE and Microsoft are announcing 13 cloud computing research projects funded for the next two years through this partnership.  The objective is “to make simple yet powerful tools readily available to researchers to extract insights [throughout science] by mining and combining diverse data sets.” From the official NSF press release: Microsoft will provide the 13 cloud computing research projects identified by NSF through its rigorous peer review process with access to Windows Azure–a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand computing and storage to […]

Presidents, performers, athletes, public servants — and now “Philliebot”? That’s right — a one-armed, three-wheeled robot that can control the speed and direction of its “pitches” will enter the ranks of preeminence today when it throws out the ceremonial first pitch before a Phillies-Brewers baseball game at 1:05pm EDT. It will be the highlight of a series of activities that are part of Philadelphia’s Science Day at the Ballpark. The robot was designed by engineering students Jordan Brindza and Jamie Gewirtz at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. From yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer: You might think PhillieBot does the same thing as those machines that spit out baseballs at […]

We’ve blogged about exciting computing innovations to improve transportation before — and there’s word this week about related work being pursued by researchers at IBM.  In collaboration with California highway officials and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, the researchers are pioneering predictive models of traffic patterns, derived from location information of individuals’ smart phones.  A key goal is to predict traffic delays with high precision before they develop based on historical data, as opposed to displaying current traffic information in near-real time.  While the IBM/Caltrans/Berkeley effort has thus far focused on smartphone users and traffic in Northern California, the researchers believe the approach is broadly extensible. The researchers will leverage […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which last year announced four $60 million Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) — is seeking public comment on its Federal Health IT Strategic Plan for 2011-2015: The Plan starts in 2011, the year when medical care entered a new era — the age of meaningful use. This new era creates opportunities to transform the health care system by improving the flow of information through health IT. Meaningful use is currently aimed at widespread adoption and information exchange, and ultimately at improving health care outcomes. The Plan demonstrates how we will build off the foundation of meaningful use to […]

I’ve just returned from Japan advising the “Mt. Fuji” team on UAVs for the Fukushima nuclear situation and I’ll be going back next week with a team of experts and robots to assist several prefectures with tsunami damage inspection and the grim task of underwater victim recovery.  (Read more about this in The New York Times.)  This will be the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue’s (CRASAR) twelfth response since the first use of rescue robots at the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse just short of a decade ago. What has changed in rescue robotics in the last 10 years?  The robots, of course!  Rescue robots originally meant small ground vehicles […]