New Scientist published a great story last week describing the history and evolution of the simplex algorithm — complete with a table capturing “2000 years of algorithms”: Its services are called upon thousands of times a second to ensure the world’s business runs smoothly — but are its mathematics as dependable as we thought?   YOU MIGHT not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the train will come to take us there. Somewhere, in some server basement right now, it is probably working on […]

New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff has penned a feature in today’s newspaper describing recent advances in robotics and automation, what they mean for the future of manufacturing and distribution, and the overall impact on the nation’s economy. The news is mixed, according to Markoff — but the article is worth a read. Some telling snippets: The Obama administration says this technological shift presents a historic opportunity for the nation to stay competitive. “The only way we are going to maintain manufacturing in the U.S. is if we have higher productivity,” said Tom Kalil, deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.   Government officials and industry executives […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Will Barkis, Gigabit Developer Evangelist at Mozilla Foundation. As the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) noted back in June, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up to run an app development challenge to build killer apps on ultra high speed, deeply programmable networks. In particular, this challenge is seeking apps and services that are impossible on today’s networks. The first phase, running through next Thursday, Aug. 23rd, is focused on ideation — and includes $15,000 in prizes for the best ideas. Imagine what you could do in a world where bandwidth, computing capacity, and access to large data sets are unlimited. Imagine if physical […]

Earlier this week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing a new international collaboration in computational neuroscience. Together with France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), NSF is seeking U.S.-French collaborative research projects that will advance the state of the art in computational neuroscience. The submission deadline is Nov. 2nd. Per the DCL: Rapid advances in empirical methods, together with powerful mathematical and computational techniques, and an unprecedented ability to store and analyze large quantities of data, place computational neuroscience at the threshold of paradigm-shifting discoveries. Computational neuroscience thrives from integrating expertise across multiple disciplines and, therefore, is well suited for funding mechanisms specifically designed to foster […]

In early 2009, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), launched the Computing Innovation Fellows Project, a short-term initiative providing recent Ph.D.s with one- to two-year postdoctoral positions at academic institutions and industrial organizations with fundamental computing research and education programs. The motivation for the program was to forestall the permanent loss of research talent likely to occur as a consequence of the financial crisis, and to enable new Ph.D.s to develop additional experience, making them effective researchers and/or teachers in the long term. Because economic conditions did not improve rapidly, the program was continued with additional funding from NSF during two subsequent years. Overall, 127 […]

University of Southern California computer scientist and neuroscientist Maja Matarić is the subject of an interview appearing in today’s Nature. On the eve of the release of a new film, Robot and Frank, winner of the annual Sundance Film Festival, Matarić talks about the film and its coverage of assistive robotics — including recent advances for people with disabilities, children with autism, and the elderly. From the Nature piece (following the link):