Last week, we blogged about Larry Smarr’s efforts to quantify his own health. Turns out Larry is speaking out today, in his own words, as part of a front-page profile on the front page of The San Diego Tribune: “Quantified health, to me, means tracking data about your body — as simple as weighing yourself on a scale once a day to as complicated as wearing a device at night to measure every 30 seconds your sleep state…   “The reason you do this — you modify your behavior. And it’s the same thing as you drive your car. You look at the speedometer, and if it’s a 60-mile-per-hour zone, you try to […]

I’d like to pause briefly today to acknowledge you — our readers. On behalf of the CCC Council, many thanks to each of you for reading the CCC Blog regularly, for contributing periodically, and for encouraging your colleagues to do so as well. We saw more traffic to the Blog last month than ever before, and so we thought we would take a quick look back today at the top 10 posts in February (following the link):

On the heels of Saturday’s New York Times‘ story about iRobot, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a feature today describing how a pair of computing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are programming “robot teachers” that can gaze and gesture like humans. According to the NSF piece: When it comes to communication, sometimes it’s our body language that says the most — especially when it comes to our eyes.   “It turns out that gaze tells us all sorts of things about attention, about mental states, about roles in conversations,” says Bilge Mutlu, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Mutlu … a human-computer interaction specialist … and his […]

Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting. From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):

A great article about iRobot Corporation — and a glimpse into the past and future in robotics — in today’s New York Times: Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.   Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.”   Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is conducting a Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge, “a prize-based challenge that seeks to advance the understanding of social media and the Internet, and explore the role the Internet and social networking [play] in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.” The challenge began on Feb. 23rd and runs until 12pm EST on Thursday, March 8th. A cash prize of up to $40,000 will be awarded to the first contest entrant to find and submit all of the QR codes. According to the challenge website: