At the Brookings Institution last week, Larry Summers, former head of the National Economic Council, and Eric Lander, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), discussed the role of government in fostering innovation — as well as the impact of science and technology R&D on the economy. Among the highlights, Lander discussed the long lead time in basic R&D investments: So current productivity is a lagging indicator of good investments made 25 years ago, perhaps. Where does, say, the information technology productivity that we celebrate today come from? You’re going to trace that all the way back to DARPA — to the DoD in the 1950s […]

Earlier this week, Google released a new report on energy innovation, in which it imagined a number of different possible energy scenarios for the U.S. Google concluded that energy innovation can grow the U.S. economy by $155 billion/year, create 1.1 million new net jobs, and save consumers almost $1000/year, while simultaneously reducing our oil consumption by 1.1 billion barrels/year and our green house emissions by 13%. The report didn’t delve into any specific technological breakthroughs — though we can all think of the many ways in which IT R&D is key here: Since predicting the probability, timing and magnitude of breakthroughs is likely to be impossible we assumed breakthroughs as fact and […]

We’re still in the midst of reviewing applications for the 2011-12 Computing Innovation Fellows Project, but I thought I would take a moment today to begin highlighting the stories of our current and former CIFellows. The CIFellows Project was always intended to provide recent Ph.D.s in computer science (and allied fields) with short-term postdoctoral positions in academia and industry, to keep them in research and teaching despite the economic downturn. In the past two years, we’ve heard great things about the CIFellows, the CIFellow-mentor relationships, the research results borne out of the program, and, most importantly, the outcomes for many of the CIFellows in terms of the permanent opportunities that […]

As thousands of firefighters battle huge wildfires in the Southwestern U.S this week, some are using a new tool in their kit: a computerized model that calculates the fire risk in real time — drawing on data about the fire’s behavior, danger, moisture over the past several decades, and terrain topology — to swiftly produce a priority map for where firefighters are most needed. Severe fire seasons of the past decade in the western United States have spurred many government agencies to manage lands to reduce fire intensity and severity to ultimately protect human life and property.   However, seven decades of fire exclusion policies have resulted in the dense forest […]

Artificial intelligence, the holy grail of computer science for decades, is becoming a reality — not Skynet nor Cylons, but as a versatile tool for some types of complex problems, the kinds of problems with which our squishy, human brains struggle. (Cue the “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords” cubicle stickers.) In an article (free registration required) in New Scientist this week, a new way of problem-solving — one in which humans help machines — is discussed. Already widely-used examples include reCAPTCHA (the clever OCR crowdsourcer) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but ambitious plans from Dafna Shahaf and Eric Horvitz (a member of the CCC Council) would create a labor pool […]

NSF/CISE Assistant Director Farnam Jahanian has issued the following letter to the community, describing the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) launched last week: Dear CISE Community,   On Friday, in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama announced the plan for major federal investments in next-generation robotics. The National Robotics Initiative (NRI) is a bold program that supports the development and use of robots that work beside, or cooperatively with, people and that enhance individual human capabilities, performance and safety. NSF is the lead agency in this multi-agency program that also includes NASA, NIH and USDA. NRI calls for cross-agency investments of up to $70 million in the first year […]