Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

Dan Kaufman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), was interviewed on Tuesday evening by New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff — the first in a series of conversations with “amazing people at research labs” being produced this summer by the Computer History Museum. During the hourlong interview, Kaufman — Markoff describes him as “not your standard, cookie-cutter DARPA official — touches on a bit of history about DARPA, his own personal background and how he landed at the agency, and a variety of projects he and his colleagues in I2O are currently spearheading. Check out the full-length video and summary after the jump…

Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers.” Noting he’s focused on the year 2020, Johnson had the following to say as part of the Q&A: Q: You study the interaction between humans and computers. What do you foresee in the next 10, 15 years?   B.D.J.: Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has issued a call for participation for an upcoming visioning workshop on spatial computing. Led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), the workshop — to be held in Washington, DC, on Sept. 10-11, 2012 — seeks to develop and promote a unified agenda for spatial computing R&D across U.S. agencies, universities, and corporations. From the call for participation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Carlos Guestrin, who will be joining the faculty of the University of Washington computer science and engineering department this fall. Carlos led the organization of the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning in San Francisco, CA. The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need […]

At a meeting of the National Science Board (NSB) yesterday, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Farnam Jahanian announced a new Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project that brings together teams from the U.S. and Japan to pursue fundamental advances in information technology in support of effective disaster management. The new SAVI — to be called Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM) — will foster a global research collaboration focused on (following the link):