In a Comment in the Aug. 4 issue of Nature — coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the public release of the World Wide Web — Oren Etzioni, Professor and Director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, calls on the computing research community to “think outside the keyword box and improve Internet” search. Two decades after Internet pioneer Tim Berners Lee introduced his World Wide Web project to the world using the alt.hypertext newsgroup, web search is on the cusp of a profound change — from simple document retrieval to question answering. Instead of poring over long lists of documents that contain requested keywords, users need direct answers […]

(This post has been updated.) David Ferrucci, the lead researcher for IBM’s Watson, was recently selected by Slate Magazine as one of “five American technology gurus” — for being “both wildly inventive and incredibly practical.” Here’s the official writeup. As part of the honor, Ferrucci was interviewed by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Among the questions: Do you have a “Holy Grail” that you’re working toward?   The Holy Grail for me is that you’ll get intelligent dialogue with a machine, like on Star Trek. My minigoal toward that is a computer that will help in reading comprehension. Imagine: A third-grade or high-school student will sit down with the computer, and the student […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Henry Kautz, Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in knowledge representation, satisfiability testing, pervasive computing, and assistive technology. He is currently President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). If you have comments on this essay, e-mail Henry or add an entry to the bottom of this blog post. Countless gallons of ink (real and virtual) have been spilled on the need to infuse the humanities into science and engineering education. For example, philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, passionately argues that […]

One of mankind’s oldest dreams is to fly like a bird. And now, thanks to a team of German researchers, we’ve moved one step closer with SmartBird — the first ultralight artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird. Inspired by the herring gull, SmartBird is capable of taking off and rising in the air by virtue of its flapping wings alone. It’s so lifelike that even real birds are seemingly taken by it. Markus Fischer, head of corporate design at Festo, a company that specializes in pneumatic and electrical automation technology, showed off SmartBird at the 2011 TEDGlobal Conference in Edinburgh last week. Check out the amazing video — just […]

We’ve covered the US Ignite and Gig.U initiatives on this blog over the course of the past few months, and now we’ve been pointed to a great video that explains, in fairly concrete terms, exactly what high-capacity networking means for everyday consumers. The video was produced by our friends at the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) — but the key points are applicable to the U.S. just the same. I encourage you to watch the 7-minute video after the jump…

Back in mid-June, we noted the President’s announcement of a $70 million National Robotics Initiative (NRI) — a multi-agency investment spanning the NSF, NIH, NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture — to fund major research advances enabling next-generation robotics. This morning, the White House announced that the Department of Defense is now supporting the NRI as well. In a post on the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog, Tom Kalil, OSTP Deputy Director for Policy, and Chuck Thorpe, OSTP Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, noted: