Beginning at 1pm EDT this afternoon, the World Science Festival — an annual celebration and exploration of science, culture, and art that’s taking place all across New York City this week  — will stream live from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a 90-minute session titled “Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”: Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the Internet. Pioneers of the digital revolution examine the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other. From social upheaval […]

A number of news outlets have begun covering Plan X, a new five-year, $110 million cyberwarfare research program that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to launch this summer. According to The Washington Post, which broke the news earlier this week: The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.   The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on […]

Our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have posted a neat montage of the exhibit hall at last week’s 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012) — which featured more than two dozen exhibitors and attracted over 1,700 attendees. The robots at the exhibit hall included the DARPA ARM… NASA’s Robonaut 2, Willow Garage’s PR2, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, and [ReconRobotics, Inc.’s Scout], which is based in Edina, Minn., and brought a makeshift Afghanistan village to the show floor. Though we’ve seen all of these bots before, we’ve learned some new things about each of them. Check it out after the jump…

In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the computer architecture research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space.  The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the CCC’s Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR) visioning reports and a study by the National Academies.  Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community white paper, 21st Century Computer Architecture: Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming our world, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, defense, and entertainment. It is hard to remember that 20 years ago the first step in information search involved a trip to the library, 10 years ago social networks […]

Mobiledia is out this week with an interesting article about “Big Data”: Technology is improving Siri, powering driverless cars, improving cancer treatment and even being called Big Brother. But “big data” is what makes it possible, and why it’s so important.   Big data refers to the analytic algorithms applied to vast amounts of data across several different places, or simply the math and computer formulas used to sift through massive amounts of data and analyze the results to answer questions and solve problems. The edge big data has over traditional analytics is its ability to include data types that aren’t organized in tabular formats, including written documents, images and […]

Data and computing were front and center at today’s meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in Washington, DC, with U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Todd Park summarizing the Administration’s rollout this week of a “digital roadmap” seeking to take advantage of existing government data repositories — and David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, and Anthony Levandowski, product manager for Google’s self-driving car technology, delivering talks about the fundamental advances being enabled by their teams’ work (more following the link).