For the third year, Major League Baseball (MLB) has partnered with Syracuse University’s School of Information Sciences to give students real life experience, and the league new ideas for fan engagement. The annual contest provides students the opportunity to pitch their ideas for real challenges created by the MLB. This year’s challenge was use the trend of “gamification” to create an application, webpage, or other form of technology that MLB.com’s community can use.   “The winning project, presented a way to merge all of the social media documents that a single game might produce — smartphone photos, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc. — into a single interface. The project’s creators, […]

Scientists have seen significant progress in developing software that can perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. A New York Times article recently highlighted advances in this type of cutting edge technology, called “deep learning.” Deep learning uses artificial intelligence to create things like speech recognition technology, and machines that can drive cars and work in factories. It is available today in programs like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which uses voice recognition software and Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses. But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just […]

Sharoda Paul, a former CIFellow, was recently featured in the New York Times article,“Looking to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption.” After her postdoctoral fellowship at a Palo Alto research center as a 2010-11 CIFellow, Sharoda Paul, an expert in social computing, chose a different path than many of her peers. While others considered jobs at big Silicon Valley companies, she decided to work for General Electric, the nation’s largest industrial company. Sharoda is one of 250 engineers recruited by General Electric, and they plan to increase their numbers of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. “The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls […]

Collections of photos, images, and videos are quickly coming to dominate the content available on the Web. Currently internet search engines rely on the text with which the images are labeled to return matches. But why is only text being used to search visual mediums? These labels can be unreliable, unhelpful and sometimes not available at all. To solve this problem, scientists at Stanford and Princeton have been working to “create a new generation of visual search technologies.” Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist at Stanford, has built the world’s largest visual database, containing more than 14 million labeled objects. A system called ImageNet, applies the data gathered from the database to […]

  The New York Times recently reported on how colleges may soon begin to allow massive open online courses (MOOCs) to be eligible for transfer credits, and used as introductory and remedial courses. The American Council on Education, a group for higher education, and Coursera, a MOOC provider, are conducting a project to determine if certain free online courses should be eligible for credit at traditional colleges. Their faculty will evaluate how much students learn from the MOOCs. Students seeking credit for the classes would have to pay a fee to take an identity-verified, proctored exam, and could have transcripts sent to colleges. According to the NYTimes, “The project is […]

On Monday, November 19, at 4:00 PM EST, the National Science Foundation will hold a webinar on its Cyber-Enabled Sustainability Science and Engineering (CyberSEES) Program. The program aims to advance interdisciplinary research in which the science and engineering of sustainability are enabled by new advances in computing, and where computational innovation is grounded in the context of sustainability problems. “CyberSEES is open to a wide range of sustainability challenges and interdisciplinary approaches; and aims to advance computing and information sciences research and infrastructure in tandem with other disciplines. Proposals are expected to forge interdisciplinary collaborations among the computer and information sciences, social and natural sciences, mathematical sciences, engineering, and associated […]