Last Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the end of its Shredder Challenge — a competition for computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts alike to piece together a series of shredded documents — when a small team of just three San Francisco-based computer programmers correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents and solved their associated puzzles 33 days after the Challenge began. “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.,” they called themselves — and they took home the $50,000 prize for using custom-coded, computer vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that […]

ACM is out with its 2011 Fellows, 46 of its members from universities, corporations, and research labs being recognized “for their contributions to computing that have provided fundamental knowledge to the computing field and generated multiple technology advances in industry, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and education.” They join a distinguished set of colleagues honored since 1993. Check out the 2011 Fellows and their contributions to the field after the jump…

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is out with a request for information (RFI) this month, seeking input on “a possible future IARPA investment (such as a program or grand challenge)” in automatic machine learning: Machine learning (ML) is used extensively in application areas of interest to IARPA including speech, language, vision, sensor processing, and multi-modal integration. Typically, expert practitioners in ML select appropriate architectures and algorithms for the application domain, performance requirements, and data characteristics of the problem at hand. Additionally, they engineer an appropriate set of features to be extracted from the data for use in the system design. Then, depending on the problem, data may be […]

In addition to Tuesday’s special Science Times describing the future of computing, The New York Times has featured several other articles this week about cutting-edge work in the field. For instance, yesterday, the Times covered University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Professor Oren Etzioni’s electronics price prediction startup Decide — which utilizes data mining and machine learning over electronics prices to help consumers determine when it’s best to buy the electronics gadgets on their wish lists: If only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car.   There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer’s lot, you couldn’t […]

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Science Times in yesterday’s New York Times — devoted entirely to “the future of computing”: What’s next? If we had a supercomputer that could predict the future, we would tell you. Then again, if the past is any guide, the predictions would certainly be wrong. This special issue takes a many-faceted look at a set of technologies that are changing the world in more ways than could ever have been foreseen… In addition to Times‘ science and technology writers John Markoff and Steve Lohr, several computing researchers have authored short essays about recent innovations — and future potential — within computing(after […]

Earlier today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a new report — Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Program — specifying an agenda for game-changing cybersecurity R&D. As U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra and White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt noted in a blog post, the report provides “a roadmap to ensuring long-term reliability and trustworthiness of the digital communications network that is increasingly at the heart of American economic growth and global competitiveness.” In particular, the plan defines four strategic thrusts (after the jump):