We blogged about brain-computer interfaces early last week — and it turns out there was a related talk later in the week by Gerwin Schalk, a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, during MIT’s 2011 Emerging Technologies Conference. Schalk described his lab’s pioneering methods for controlling computers with thoughts instead of fingers: [In 1968], Doug Engelbart actually showed for the first time how it is possible to use a mouse, a graphical interface, and networked computers to … augment human function. The idea of course was to offload some of the … clerical tasks that we used to perform as humans to a computer that [could] hopefully do these things much faster…   So the vision […]

Attendees of the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2011) — a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users — stretched into the hallway outside the meeting room during the first of two Challenges and Visions sessions held in Seattle, WA, in late August. According to Hank Korth, CCC Council member and liaison to the VLDB program committee, “The talks were fantastic [and the follow-on] questions [were] great.” In keeping with tradition for these CCC-funded sessions, the VLDB Challenges and Visions Track emphasized visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and opportunities in data-centric research outside of the current mainstream topics of the field. […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Shashi Shekhar and Mohamed Mokbel, faculty in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. The pair organized the 12th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases in Minneapolis, MN, this week. We were delighted to host a successful Vision and Challenge Track at the 12th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases this past Wednesday through Friday. SSTD 2011 was the twelfth event in a series of biennial symposia that discuss research in spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal data management. This year’s SSTD program exhibited diversity across organizations (e.g., academic, industry, and government), career stage (e.g., graduate students, early-stage, mid-stage, […]

Sam Madden, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), delivered a great talk about “The Rise of Mobile Data” at the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration earlier this year. Madden described his work in the area of sensor data analytics — specifically location analytics — which seeks to understand, make sense of, and process the wealth of data our smartphones are generating, all the while providing users control over privacy. [There are] going to be five billion cellphones in service in the world in 2011. That’s a pretty staggering number… there’s something like 6.8 billion people […]

A couple months ago, I blogged about David Ferrucci’s excellent keynote at this year’s Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Jose, CA — noting how Ferrucci stepped through the creation of Watson, from conception of the “Jeopardy!” challenge in 2004 to the supercomputer’s nationally televised victory earlier this year. Well, now, ACM has made Ferrucci’s talk — along with the rest of this year’s FCRC plenaries — available through its Digital Library free of cost. Simply click here and create a free profile to either download or stream the 40-minute presentation.   And read the original summary of Ferrucci’s talk after the jump…

At the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, Stanford President John Hennessy stepped through the history of computer architecture, with an eye toward the future — including multicore and multithreading (fine-grained vs. simultaneous). I’m going to try to both take a look backward and then a look forward and talk about what the implications are. “The March of Technology” is indeed a good “uber-title” for this type of talk, because it really is about the dramatic changes and about the inflection point that we passed through, and what some of those inflections are.   Let’s face it: most of the world is not going to […]