An interesting article in The New York Times this weekend about the resurgence of hardware prototyping in the Bay Area: In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It’s been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones.   But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software.   It is an expansion of a trend that began a few years ago with the Flip videophone, a sleeper hit, and has recently accelerated with Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that refocuses a photo after it is taken; and the Pebble smartwatch, a wristwatch that can interact with a smartphone.   Although the hardware is not […]

Also in this week’s Nature, a fascinating review of an album of evolved music, composed by the Darwinian computer program Iamus, that is “at the very least musically ‘plausible’”: If a computer can produce an artwork that moves us, does it take artificial intelligence beyond an important threshold? That is one of the questions raised by Iamus, an algorithm that composes music from scratch, developed by Francisco Vico and his colleagues at the University of Malaga in Spain.   Iamus, an album of compositions by the algorithm — including two orchestral pieces played by the London Symphony Orchestra — comes out on 1 September. A live performance of several Iamus pieces […]

There’s a great article in this week’s Nature — out this afternoon — featuring computer scientists like Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg, Harvard’s David Lazer (now at Northeastern), and Columbia’s Duncan Watts, who are leveraging today’s digital data streams (e.g., e-mail, social media, mobile devices, etc.) to transform the way we study social science. Here’s an excerpt about their pioneering efforts in computational social science: Jon Kleinberg’s early work was not for the mathematically faint of heart. His first publication1, in 1992, was a computer-science paper with contents as dense as its title: ‘On dynamic Voronoi diagrams and the minimum Hausdorff distance for point sets under Euclidean motion in the plane’.   That was before the World-Wide Web […]

On Monday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a Sept. 27 Proposers’ Day for its Foundational Cyberwarfare program, a new initiative that will seek “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments.” Codenamed “Plan X,” the initiative will also support “novel research into the nature of cyberwarfare and support development of fundamental strategies and tactics needed to dominate the cyber battlespace.” The Proposers’ Day comes in advance of the formal request for proposals, which is anticipated in late September. According to the notice, “DARPA seeks innovative research in four key areas in support of Plan X” (following the link):

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which in fall 2009 launched the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, providing funding to four teams pursuing research to generate new knowledge and innovations enabling “the meaningful use of health IT and a high-performing, adaptive, nationwide health care system” — is out with an interesting video (after the jump) describing what advances in computing mean for the healthcare system of the future. The video, accompanied by a new web portal, HealthIT.gov, touches on some of the themes captured by the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) October 2009 workshop on discovery […]

We all identify cities by certain attributes, such as building architecture, street signage, even the lamp posts and parking meters dotting the sidewalks. Now there’s a neat study by computer graphics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — presented at SIGGRAPH 2012 earlier this month — that develops novel computational techniques to analyze imagery in Google Street View and identify what gives a city its character (more following the link):