From yesterday’s New York Times: What’s a 10-letter word for smarty pants?   This weekend the world may find out when computer technology again tries to best human brains, this time at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn.   Computers can make mincemeat of chess masters and vanquish the champions of “Jeopardy!” The question is: Can the trophy go to a crossword-solving program, Dr. Fill — a wordplay on filling in a crossword (get it?) and the screen name of the talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw — when it tests its algorithms against the wits of 600 of the nation’s top crossword solvers? [More after the jump.]  

Earlier today at a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren and Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) opened the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) on its campus in Washington, DC. LASR aims “to support cutting-edge research in robotics and autonomous systems of interest to the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Department of Defense, [including] unmanned underwater vehicles, autonomous firefighting robots, and sensor networks.” According to a post on the OSTP Blog announcing the opening: LASR will … advance the goals of the President’s National Robotics Initiative, a multi-agency effort to strengthen U.S. leadership in robotics and to […]

Earlier this month, the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) released a $150 million funding opportunity open to all breakthrough energy technologies. Individual awards under the Open FOA will range between $250,000 and $10 million. According to the announcement: To address the challenges imposed by the rapidly evolving global energy market, ARPA-E seeks to support transformational research in all areas of energy R&D, including resource identification, extraction, transportation and use, and energy generation, storage, transmission and use in both the transportation and stationary power sectors. Areas of research responsive to this FOA include (but are not limited to) electricity generation by both renewable and non-renewable means, electricity transmission, storage, and distribution; […]

Hot off the press from ACM this morning: ACM has named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. […]

As we noted in this space last month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is holding workshops this spring to help young faculty prepare competitive CAREER proposals. Applications for the second workshop — to be held in Tempe, AZ, near the campus of Arizona State University — open today. The deadline to apply is April 23rd, with decisions to be returned within a couple days of that date. According to NSF and the workshop organizers: The workshop intends to provide young faculty members skills in CAREER proposal writing, panel review experience, and opportunities to interact with NSF program directors and recent NSF awardees. The major components of […]

On Feb. 16th, over 150 Federal officials, Congressional staffers, academic researchers, and industry leaders packed a room overlooking the United States Capitol to mark two decades of coordinated Federal investment in networking and information technology research and development with a daylong symposium exploring progress and prospects in the field. Today, I’m delighted to announce that we are launching a new website with complete materials from this extraordinary day — including videos, photos, slides, and written summaries from the 19 15-minute presentations by leaders of the field, plus a luncheon keynote by former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime champion of information technology R&D, and special remarks by former Congressman Tom […]