The National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a brief overview of the results of its annual Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) for 2010, finding that the numbers of Ph.D.s in the computer sciences increased by 3.5 percent that year, more than in any other discipline. (The total number of doctorates awarded by U.S. academic institutions declined for the first time since 2002 — and NSF notes that reclassification of degrees and discontinuation of data collection in certain areas contributed at least in part to this drop.) According to the NSF InfoBrief:

A series of computing research advances making the news in the past week: A New Forecasting Algorithm to Predict Hurricane Intensity and Wind Speed Scientists at Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Intelligent Data Analysis Lab (IDA) [have] developed a new forecasting algorithm called the Prediction Intensity Interval model for Hurricanes (PIIH) to help better predict hurricane intensity.   PIIH also predicts the potential ranges, from high to low, of maximum hurricane wind speeds, specifying the likelihood of wind speeds in varying ranges.   “Accurately predicting intensity means vastly improving hurricane readiness and reducing the risk to property and human life,” said Michael Hahsler, visiting assistant professor for Computer Science and Engineering at SMU. “With […]

Last Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the end of its Shredder Challenge — a competition for computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts alike to piece together a series of shredded documents — when a small team of just three San Francisco-based computer programmers correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents and solved their associated puzzles 33 days after the Challenge began. “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.,” they called themselves — and they took home the $50,000 prize for using custom-coded, computer vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that […]

ACM is out with its 2011 Fellows, 46 of its members from universities, corporations, and research labs being recognized “for their contributions to computing that have provided fundamental knowledge to the computing field and generated multiple technology advances in industry, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and education.” They join a distinguished set of colleagues honored since 1993. Check out the 2011 Fellows and their contributions to the field after the jump…

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is out with a request for information (RFI) this month, seeking input on “a possible future IARPA investment (such as a program or grand challenge)” in automatic machine learning: Machine learning (ML) is used extensively in application areas of interest to IARPA including speech, language, vision, sensor processing, and multi-modal integration. Typically, expert practitioners in ML select appropriate architectures and algorithms for the application domain, performance requirements, and data characteristics of the problem at hand. Additionally, they engineer an appropriate set of features to be extracted from the data for use in the system design. Then, depending on the problem, data may be […]

In addition to Tuesday’s special Science Times describing the future of computing, The New York Times has featured several other articles this week about cutting-edge work in the field. For instance, yesterday, the Times covered University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Professor Oren Etzioni’s electronics price prediction startup Decide — which utilizes data mining and machine learning over electronics prices to help consumers determine when it’s best to buy the electronics gadgets on their wish lists: If only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car.   There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer’s lot, you couldn’t […]