We’ve all heard about Cannes.  And Sundance.  And perhaps Slamdance.  But have you heard about the Robot Film Festival? This past weekend, a huge crowd of roboticists, artists, and filmakers converged on Manhattan for the world’s first-ever Robot Film Festival. Dubbed a two-day celebration of robots on film, the event sought “to inject a sense of playfulness into traditional science and engineering and explore frontiers before technically feasible.” Over 50 short films were screened, and the official awards ceremony saw 3D-printed “Botsker” statuettes presented to “Best Robot Actor,” “Most Uncanny,” and the like in a unique black-tie, red-carpet gala. See some of the short films after the jump…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a new solicitation for Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE), a Foundation-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF-funded disciplines including CISE. The focus of the this year’s PIRE RFP is on the NSF-wide investment in sustainability (Science, Engineering, and Education of Sustainability, or SEES): Recognizing the value of international partnerships in addressing critical science and engineering questions, NSF established the Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) program in 2005. PIRE is an NSF-wide program that supports fundamental, interdisciplinary, international research and education in physical, living, human, and engineered systems. PIRE enables research at the leading edge of science and […]

At the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, Stanford President John Hennessy stepped through the history of computer architecture, with an eye toward the future — including multicore and multithreading (fine-grained vs. simultaneous). I’m going to try to both take a look backward and then a look forward and talk about what the implications are. “The March of Technology” is indeed a good “uber-title” for this type of talk, because it really is about the dramatic changes and about the inflection point that we passed through, and what some of those inflections are.   Let’s face it: most of the world is not going to […]

DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has issued a new solicitation for “innovative research proposals in the area of social media in strategic communication” that will give rise to “a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.” Here’s the overview from the official broad agency announcement: The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media-sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. […]

In the past year, we’ve developed a set of brochures describing fundamental computing research challenges in a few areas of national priority, including healthcare, sustainability (spanning energy, transportation, and environment), and education. These brochures — based entirely on white papers prepared by the research community — are intended to appeal to a broad audience. Browse through them after the jump…

In a public session last Friday, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) spent time discussing the future of scientific research in the U.S. — hearing from Keith Yamamoto, Executive Vice Dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, and Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Professor of Technology and Public Policy at Harvard. The pair spoke about an upcoming American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Study on the Impacts of Federal and Industry Funding of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on American Universities (ARISE II). While much of the discussion centered on the life sciences, there were some interesting points raised about the divide between basic and applied research — as well as the future […]