Last week in Seattle a record attendance of more than 11,000 people from throughout the world met at the Seattle Convention Center for SC11 — the largest international supercomputing conference focusing on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis through a large industrial and research exhibition and a highly peer reviewed technical program (which was attended by almost 5,000 people this year). The conference keynote presentation was given by Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA®.

Among the 10 world-changing ideas we featured earlier today is the “forever health monitor,” i.e., the ability to exploit today’s technology to quickly, easily, and fairly inexpensively monitor our own vital signs in real time, so that we may pinpoint the first signs of trouble as they arise. It turns out one man — Internet pioneer and founding director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) Larry Smarr — has been doing exactly that for the past 10 years. And for all his personal health instrumentation efforts, Xconomy has named Larry its Xconomist of the Week: In the 10 years since he moved to San Diego to become founding director of the [University of California] system’s [CalIT2], […]

In the December 2011 issue of Scientific American: Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.   What other simple but revolutionary ideas are out there in the labs, waiting for the right moment to make it big? We have found 10, and … we explain what they are and how they might shake things […]

This fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized experiment in online learning, offering three of its most popular introductory computer science classes — Machine Learning, Introduction to Databases, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence — through the Web for free. The classes, taught by Stanford faculty, are being held online in conjunction with the regular on-campus courses. And by all accounts, they’ve been a huge hit: over 130,000 people signed up for the AI class, and while the numbers have dropped off considerably now that school is actually in session, some 35,000 students turned in the first three weeks of homework assignments (in addition to the 175 Stanford students taking the class on campus). Now […]

Last month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a new multi-disciplinary program — Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) — seeking proposals that address cybersecurity needs. SaTC replaces NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program, expanding support within the Foundation to include, in addition to the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Late yesterday, in an effort to help researchers interested in cybersecurity understand the opportunities being made available through SaTC, NSF announced that it will hold a webinar about the new program on Friday, December 2, 2011, at 1pm EST. From the official solicitation: […]

Following last month’s focus on smart health and wellbeing, IEEE Intelligent Systems is inaugurating the Department of AI and Sustainability — another area of national importance! — in its forthcoming November/December 2011 issue. Doug Fisher, a Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University who recently served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), will be the department’s editor — and he’s just penned the debut article: When preparing for a March 2007 talk at [NSF], I searched the Web for scholarly work on AI and climate change, the natural environment, and sustainability. My search was not exhaustive, largely based on keywords, but it wasn’t trivial […]