The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report titled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and Economy, calling for improved accounting of ecosystem services and greater protection of environmental capital. The report notes the importance of the nation’s ecosystems and biodiversity to the overall economy, and recommends that the Federal government institute and fund a Quadrennial Ecosystems Services Trends (QuEST) Assessment that draws upon existing monitoring programs as well as newly recommended activities to identify trends related to ecosystem sustainability and possible policy responses. Importantly, PCAST also recommends that we expand the use of evolving informatics technologies — drawing from another recent PCAST report about networking and information […]

Fresh on the heels of announcing a call for social media research, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has issued a solicitation for “innovative research proposals in the area of automated program analysis for cybersecurity.” From the official broad agency announcement: Automated program analysis is a fundamentally hard problem. It has been known since the work of Church and Turing in 1936 that virtually any interesting question about the properties of programs is undecidable — that is, it is provably impossible to build an automated program analysis tool that will answer any question about cybersecurity for any program and input with complete accuracy…

Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new five-year, $18.5 million Engineering Research Center (ERC) that will pursue interdisciplinary research and education in areas of health and robotics: The NSF ERC for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (ERC/SNE) will create devices to restore or augment the body’s capabilities for sensation and movement. The foundation for the new devices will be new mathematical and structural understanding of the nervous system. Center researchers will combine this new understanding with improved communication and interface design and with advanced control and adaptation technologies.   The Center aims to create devices that function and adapt seamlessly with the body, enabling dynamic and highly complex interactions with human […]

In a Comment in the Aug. 4 issue of Nature — coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the public release of the World Wide Web — Oren Etzioni, Professor and Director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, calls on the computing research community to “think outside the keyword box and improve Internet” search. Two decades after Internet pioneer Tim Berners Lee introduced his World Wide Web project to the world using the alt.hypertext newsgroup, web search is on the cusp of a profound change — from simple document retrieval to question answering. Instead of poring over long lists of documents that contain requested keywords, users need direct answers […]

(This post has been updated.) David Ferrucci, the lead researcher for IBM’s Watson, was recently selected by Slate Magazine as one of “five American technology gurus” — for being “both wildly inventive and incredibly practical.” Here’s the official writeup. As part of the honor, Ferrucci was interviewed by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Among the questions: Do you have a “Holy Grail” that you’re working toward?   The Holy Grail for me is that you’ll get intelligent dialogue with a machine, like on Star Trek. My minigoal toward that is a computer that will help in reading comprehension. Imagine: A third-grade or high-school student will sit down with the computer, and the student […]

One of mankind’s oldest dreams is to fly like a bird. And now, thanks to a team of German researchers, we’ve moved one step closer with SmartBird — the first ultralight artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird. Inspired by the herring gull, SmartBird is capable of taking off and rising in the air by virtue of its flapping wings alone. It’s so lifelike that even real birds are seemingly taken by it. Markus Fischer, head of corporate design at Festo, a company that specializes in pneumatic and electrical automation technology, showed off SmartBird at the 2011 TEDGlobal Conference in Edinburgh last week. Check out the amazing video — just […]