From a story published on The New York Times‘ website late yesterday: IBM researchers said Thursday that they had designed high-speed circuits from graphene, an ultra-thin material that has a host of promising applications, from high-bandwidth communication to a new generation of low-cost smartphone and television displays.   The IBM advance, which the researchers reported in the journal Science, is a circuit known as a broadband frequency mixer that was built on a wafer of silicon. Widely used in all kinds of communications products, the circuits shift signals from one frequency to another.   In the Science paper, the IBM researchers describe a demonstration in which they deposited several layers of […]

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been highlighting on this blog several of the excellent talks from the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium held at MIT earlier this year. The symposium — part of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration — described how computer science is changing the world. This week, we showcase another talk, this one by Tom Leighton, the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies — a global leader in web acceleration and performance — and a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. Leighton described the history of theoretical computer science, including key advances like the RSA encryption protocol, the Viterbi algorithm (which is used today in cell phones, digital TVs, etc., and […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) are co-sponsoring a pair of workshops on US Ignite and GigU — initiatives we’ve covered in this space before — at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, today and tomorrow. For those interested, you can watch live webcasts of the plenary sessions here (note the timings): – Today 1-2pm EDT (right now!): Kickoff panel with Jim Baller (PSGW), Blair Levin (GigU), and Suzi Iacono (NSF/CISE) – Friday 11:30am-12:30pm EDT: Closing panel with Jim Baller (PSGW), Blair Levin (GigU), and Suzi Iacono (NSF/CISE) (Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division on Research on Learning (DRL) has announced its intent to fund up to 24 Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences (CRPA) awards in the coming year, enabling the research community to share NSF research (outcomes) with the public through informal learning approaches. Researchers from all disciplines — including computer science — are encouraged to apply. Proposals may be submitted at any time, and each award will be up to $150,000 for up to two years. CRPA — now housed within the DRL’s Informal Science Education (ISE) program — has a history of funding “active researchers to share with the public key features of their research such as […]

Calling her colleagues the “best-in-class scientists and engineers [who] come to serve their country,” DARPA Director Regina Dugan described in a recent interview at the D9 Conference how her agency is driving technological innovations that better enable our nation’s military to “create and prevent strategic surprise.” Among the topics she discussed was cybersecurity: One of the things we have been investigating is how you design hardware and software within a computer so that you can determine yourself, or the computer itself can evolve, based on its own experience with threat. It’s modeled after the human immune system. An awful lot of the reason that people haven’t investigated these types of […]

David Ferrucci’s official title is “IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.” But to the world, he’s the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer system that bested two humans in a nationally televised broadcast of the popular game show Jeopardy! earlier this year. And not just any two humans, but the two very best players in the show’s 27-year history. On Monday, Ferrucci delivered a fantastic keynote at the ACM’s 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Ferrucci walked the audience — nearly 2,000 computer scientists from around the country — through the creation of Watson, from its initial conception […]