At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added): “Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test. […]

Harvard computer scientist and CCC Council member Margo Seltzer was interviewed last week about her thoughts on women in computer science: Txchnologist: Although women make up nearly half of the workforce in the U.S., the Department of Commerce reports that only one out of four employed computer scientists is female. Does this fit with what you see?   Margo Seltzer: It’s stunning. The numbers are bad, and they’re not particularly getting better globally. The only place that I’ve encountered worse numbers is actually finance and entrepreneurism. Those are the only events that I’ve ever gone to where I’ve felt that I was even more outnumbered.   Txch: What do you think accounts for the disparity? [more following […]