Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn is featured in CNN.com’s TEDTalk Tuesdays this week for his Duolingo project, which seeks to provide a free way to learn languages and translate the World Wide Web. Check out Luis’s write-up for CNN.com below, and video of his TED Talk after the jump. I want to translate the Web into every major language: every webpage, every video, and, yes, even Justin Bieber’s tweets.   With its content split up into hundreds of languages — and with over 50% of it in English — most of the Web is inaccessible to most people in the world. This problem is pressing, now more than ever, with millions of people […]

President Obama, together with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and members of the Armed Forces, rolled out a new military strategy in a much-publicized event at the Pentagon last week. What’s interesting is that the strategy calls for an increased investment on technological innovation, including in areas of cybersecurity and intelligence systems. As the President penned in his written introduction to the strategy: As we end today’s wars and reshape our Armed Forces, we will ensure that our military is agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies. In particular, we will continue to invest in the capabilities critical to future success, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; counterterrorism; countering weapons of […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is unveiling a new website today allowing researchers to advertise undergraduate summer research positions and students to find such opportunities. These listings will appear from a link on the CCC’s relatively new Computer Science Research Opportunities & Graduate School (CSGS) website, which has information on summer research opportunities, a Q&A on “why do research,” and links to many recurring summer programs (e.g., NSF REUs, CRA-W, CREUC Canada, among others). The site also has information and advice on applying to graduate school in computing fields (with Q&As with faculty from around the country as well as current Ph.D. students) and a “Day in the Life” Blog where […]

(This post has been updated; scroll down for the latest.) As we’ve previously reported in this space, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently issued a cross-directorate solicitation on Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB), calling for interdisciplinary proposals addressing “fundamental technical and scientific issues that would support much needed transformation of healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive, proactive, evidence-based, person-centered and focused on wellbeing rather than disease.” The SHB program, with support from the NSF’s directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), expands a program first implemented by CISE in spring 2011. Today, the NSF is announcing that it will hold a webinar next Wednesday, Jan. 11 for individuals interested in the new […]

There’s a great piece in MIT’s Technology Review this week — written by Thilo Koslowski, Vice President and head of the Automotive, Vehicle ICT & Mobility Practice at Gartner — describing how cars are becoming networked, to the Internet and to one another, and how this new trend will redefine transportation as a whole in the next decade. Some excerpts: The automotive and transportation industries are entering a phase of the most significant innovation since the popularization of personal automobiles a hundred years ago. Similar to the way telephones have evolved into smart phones, over the next 10 years automobiles will rapidly become “connected vehicles” that access, consume, and create information and share it with […]

Last March, we noted that the National Science Foundation (NSF), together with 7 other international funders, was launching the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences. Called Digging Into Data, the challenge specifically sought to promote large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. Yesterday, 14 winners representing the U.S., Canada, Netherlands, and U.K., were announced, and together they will receive nearly $5 million in grants “to investigate how data processing, analysis, and transmission techniques can be applied to ‘big data’ to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research.” According to the NSF press […]