What subject do high school students dislike the most? My bet is math — it’s confusing, abstract, and requires meticulous attention to detail. But at it’s heart, math is an exciting tool to grapple with otherwise unsolvable problems and ideas. The first time someone explained integrals to me, I couldn’t help but be amazed. Bret Victor is a self-described Technology Hobo (seriously, that’s what he calls himself) who wants to change the way we interact with math. His project, Kill Math, seeks to change the way students see math by incorporating new technology to transform the abstract, like equations, into corporeal, intuitive and interactive visualizations. Bret sees technology as the […]

Remember the electronic reservation system that you used to book your summer vacation this year? Well, in all likelihood, it was powered by information technology from ITA Software — the 450-person, Cambridge, MA-based company that was recently bought by Google for $700 million. ITA Software’s innovative travel tool — QPX — powers some of the world’s leading travel websites, including those of Orbitz and Travelocity, as well as United, American, Southwest, and Alaska Airlines. At the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, ITA Software’s co-founder and President & CEO Jeremy Wertheimer described the history of travel technology, delving into the staggering complexity of finding and […]

Tom Malone and Luis von Ahn — with funding from the NSF’s CISE Directorate — are organizing an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of fields relevant to understanding and designing collective intelligence of many types. This first-ever conference — Collective Intelligence 2012 — will take place in Cambridge, MA, on April 18-20, 2012, and comprise invited talks, oral paper presentations, and poster sessions. From the official call for papers:

A couple of very interesting prize-based competitions have been announced in the past week. The first — with Vint Cerf, U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, and former Congressman Tom Davis among the judges — calls for innovative ways for IT to improve government: The Merit Awards is a new innovation contest that challenges the world to come forth with ideas on how to use IT to improve the quality of government. Focused on incenting people to get involved in their government, the award offers a $50,000 prize for smart, new thinking. But the program is not only open to Americans. Innovation knows no borders — nor does it need a […]

A new National Science and Technology Council report released Monday — titled A Policy Framework for 21st Century Grid — describes ways to speed development of a smart grid that reduces energy consumption, efficiently delivers power from renewable sources, and decreases the frequency and length of blackouts. What’s most interesting — to us, anyway — is how the report calls attention to the need for fundamental research in several areas of computer science. Notably, “the four essential pillars that will enable the U.S. to transition to a smarter grid” all feature aspects of IT R&D prominently: Enable Cost-Effective Smart Grid Investments: Smart grid technology can drive improvements in system efficiency, resiliency, and […]

Following up on an article about rising enrollments in computer science this past Saturday, The New York Times has just published a fabulous Room for Debate essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?“: Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of “The Social Network,” computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.   The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system — so much so […]