Earlier this month, another huge crowd of roboticists, artists, and filmakers converged on Manhattan for the second annual Robot Film Festival, a daylong celebration of robots on film. Founded by Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot and Carnegie Mellon University and co-organized by Marek Michalowski of Beatbots, the festival’s goal is “to highlight innovation, explore frontiers before technically feasible and investigate the impact of humanity and machinery interrelations.” The festival — themed “Are Robots Man’s Best Friend?” this year — kicked off with a screening of Sundance Film Festival winner Robot and Frank, due to hit U.S. theaters in August. Check out selected winners of the 2012 “Botskers” after the jump…

Dan Kaufman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), was interviewed on Tuesday evening by New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff — the first in a series of conversations with “amazing people at research labs” being produced this summer by the Computer History Museum. During the hourlong interview, Kaufman — Markoff describes him as “not your standard, cookie-cutter DARPA official — touches on a bit of history about DARPA, his own personal background and how he landed at the agency, and a variety of projects he and his colleagues in I2O are currently spearheading. Check out the full-length video and summary after the jump…

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI), “seeking ideas and input from the public … on successful strategies and remaining challenges in the creation of health IT-enabled quality measure development and reporting.” Comments are due by Aug. 20th. Among the questions regarding quality measurement enabled by health IT being posed in the RFI are (following the link):

Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers.” Noting he’s focused on the year 2020, Johnson had the following to say as part of the Q&A: Q: You study the interaction between humans and computers. What do you foresee in the next 10, 15 years?   B.D.J.: Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we […]

To help mark the 60th anniversary of its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new video contest — “Creating the Future” — that challenges Fellows to create short videos, not to exceed 90 seconds each, communicating how their NSF-funded research will help shape the future for themselves, for their field, or for the world. Submissions are due by Sept. 14, 2012, and winners — to be selected by a panel of judges as well as the broader public for a “People’s Choice” award category — will be announced in mid-November. First place carries a $2,000 cash prize. According to the contest website (following the link):

At the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference today, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) will roll out a new report — “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology” — updating the widely known “tire tracks” diagram that links government investments in academic and industry research to the creation of new information technology industries that drive our economy. According to the report (click on the link below to read more and see the new “tire tracks” figure!):