This is a guest post by Will Barkis, PhD. Will is a Gigabit Evangelist and, until recently, led Mozilla’s gigabit innovation efforts for the past two years as Project Lead and “Gigabit Developer Evangelist” on the Mozilla Ignite Challenge and subsequently as Director of the Gigabit Community Fund. Before Mozilla, he worked on computer & information science & engineering policy at the National Science Foundation for two years, helping launch the US Ignite Initiative with a team at NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and working on a number of tech policy issues. He can be reached at @willbarkis; wbarkis [at] gmail. The gigabit future is here Gigabit-per-second networks are rolling out around […]

A middle school student who used computer science to develop a hundred million dollar cost savings plan for the government was featured in an article on CNN.com, “Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions.” Suvir Mirchandani, 14, was thinking of ways to cut waste and save money at his middle school. He noticed there had been a movement to recycle and use double-sided printing, but what about the ink (which is expensive) on all those pages. Interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink. … […]

NSF is holding a webinar on Thursday, April 3, 2014 – 2:30 pm EDT to share information about the recently released solicitation, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Please register here  by 11:59pm EDT on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. From the NSF announcement available here: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components. Advances in CPS will enable capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability that will far exceed the simple embedded systems of today. CPS technology will transform the way people interact with engineered systems — just as the Internet has transformed the way people interact with information. […]

In an article on Robohub, Gill Pratt, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, shares his thoughts on advances and changes in the robotics field. Pratt talked about the importance of cloud computing in robotics: Perhaps most exciting for the future of cloud computing in robotics is that when one robot learns how to perceive something, or learns how to do a particular task, that learning can be instantly shared with other robots. This sharing could have a catalytic effect on the capabilities of robots, particularly in structured environments.   … If you look at the research being done we see a lot of possibilities with cloud computing for robots. […]

A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Brandeis University have provided the first experimental evidence that validates Alan Turing’s theory of morphogenesis, more than 60 years after his death. Turing is well known for his contributions to computer science, he set in motion the computer age and his World War II codebreaking helped turn the tide of the Second World War. Turing also developed theories in biology and chemistry.  In his only paper in biology, Turing proposed a theory of morphogenesis, or how identical copies of a single cell differentiate, for example, into an organism with arms and legs, a head and tail. A press release from the […]

Earlier this month, the SXSW interactive conference held a session on Cloud Robotics: Instant Scalability and Capability. The panel was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal as one of the moments that stood out at the conference: The implications are vast: Robots could draw on the experiences of other robots to better perform tasks such as customer service or even surgery. Self-driving cars could be connected to a global library of maps and real-time traffic data. There could even be a robot app store for machines to instantly get new capabilities.   Robots could also become better human companions, since they would be constantly learning from the examples of others, […]