The Wall Street Journal features a story about Amazon.com’s purchase this week of robot company Kiva Systems, Inc., providing a glimpse into some of the many computing research advances — in robotics, machine intelligence, and optimization — that have enabled Kiva’s $775 million success story. According to the WSJ article: Amazon.com Inc., said Monday it is buying Kiva Systems, Inc., which makes robots used in shipping centers. The $775 million acquisition comes as Amazon continues its heavy spending on fulfillment centers to help fuel its business…   With Kiva, Amazon is now looking at a more automated approach. The robots are already used by two websites that Amazon has acquired: shoe-retailer Zappos.com and baby-products site […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), is co-sponsoring a limited-participation visioning workshop on computing for disaster management. Led by Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University) and Trevor Darrell (University of California, Berkeley), the workshop will identify ways in which fundamental computing research in the broadest terms can advance the field of emergency response and recovery. The workshop will take place in Washington, DC, on April 23-24, 2012. From the call for participation (following the link):

Earlier this month, we highlighted the Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response codes (CLIQR) Quest, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) prize-based challenge seeking to advance the understanding of social media and the Internet. The challenge offered $40,000 to the first individual or team that could locate 7 posters appearing in U.S. cities bearing the DARPA logo and a quick response (QR) code. Though the challenge ran for 15 days — from Feb. 23rd through March 8th — unlike in past challenges, notably the DARPA Network “Red Balloon” Challenge, no team was able to locate all 7 posters and submit the corresponding QR codes. The reason? (Click “more” to find out!)

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) In IEEE’s Spectrum this week, there’s an interesting interview about man-machine interfaces with neurosurgeon and self-described hacker Richard Bucholz, a Professor of Neurosurgery and the Medical Director for the St. Louis Regional MEG Center at Saint Louis University, and a leading participant in the Human Connectome Project — a $30 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative to map the human brain. Disabilities such as epilepsy, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even Parkinson’s disease are being treated with neuroimplants. Other scientists are working to substitute hearing for sight in blind people, and still others want to solve blindness entirely by implanting cameras in […]

Earlier this month, the National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program — the Federal program that provides a framework and mechanisms for coordination among 15 Federal agencies that support networking and information technology research and development — issued a Call for Papers for the National Symposium on Moving Target Research. This daylong symposium, which comes on the heels of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Program report published in December, “intends to bring together and publish the work of the Moving Target cybersecurity research community to provide a basis for building on […]

Back in January, we described a new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program focused on innovative research proposals “in support of the development of new software-based biometric modalities” that go beyond passwords for identity validation. Now The New York Times is out with a story that sheds more light on the initiative: IMAGINE sitting down at your work keyboard, typing in your user name and starting work right away — no password needed.   That’s a vision that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Defense Department, wants to turn into a reality. It will distribute research funds to develop software that determines, just by the way you type, […]