From The New York Times‘ Bits Blog yesterday: Millions of people watched a robot descend last week on Mars, about 154 million miles away, while it shared video, photos and status updates from its own Twitter account.   I had my own encounter with a robot last week. I had dinner with one … in Silicon Valley.   The dinner was at Willow Garage, a robotics company in Menlo Park, and was intended to introduce some reporters to the robots the company is building.   The main attraction was the PR2, which can pick things up, fold laundry, open doors and bring cups, plates and other small objects to people. The PR2 […]

In an article published on The New York Times’ website this afternoon, the newspaper’s technology writer Steve Lohr describes the history and evolution of “Big Data” — noting it’s “been a crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, as a term and yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream.” In the writeup, Lohr notes the role of white papers produced by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC):

Several directorates within the National Science Foundation (NSF) — including Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) — issued a Dear Colleague Letter this afternoon calling for proposals relating to the potential threat of debris fields from the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami upon the West coast of North America: In the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, fields of debris are now washing up on the western shores of the United States. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Japanese authorities say that approximately five million tons of wreckage flowed into the Pacific Ocean following the earthquake and tsunami. While a […]

An interesting article on Wired.com today, featuring Google computer scientists Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: Time and again, we hear the story of Xerox PARC, the Silicon Valley research lab that developed just about every major technology behind the PC revolution, from the graphical user interface and the laser printer to Ethernet networking and object-oriented programming. But because Google is so concerned with keeping its latest data center work hidden from competitors — and because engineers like Jeff Dean aren’t exactly self-promoters — the general public is largely unaware of Google’s impact on the very foundations of modern computing. Google is the Xerox PARC of the cloud computing age (more following the link…).  

There’s been a lot written about NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory this week, in light of its successful landing on the surface of Mars early Monday morning — including the observation that today’s smartphones are about as smart as Curiosity’s computers. Turns out there was an extraordinary amount of computer science and engineering that went into the rover’s development and testing. According to Computerworld:

Vipin Kumar, the William Norris Professor and head of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) 2012 Innovation Award at the opening plenary of the 18th international ACM SIGKDD Conference next Sunday in Beijing, China. Since 2000, the annual award has been “conferred on one individual or one group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations in the KDD field have had a lasting impact on advancing the theory and practice of the field.” According to SIGKDD, the citation for Vipin’s award reads as follows (after the jump):