On the heels of Saturday’s New York Times‘ story about iRobot, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a feature today describing how a pair of computing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are programming “robot teachers” that can gaze and gesture like humans. According to the NSF piece: When it comes to communication, sometimes it’s our body language that says the most — especially when it comes to our eyes.   “It turns out that gaze tells us all sorts of things about attention, about mental states, about roles in conversations,” says Bilge Mutlu, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Mutlu … a human-computer interaction specialist … and his […]

Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting. From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is conducting a Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge, “a prize-based challenge that seeks to advance the understanding of social media and the Internet, and explore the role the Internet and social networking [play] in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.” The challenge began on Feb. 23rd and runs until 12pm EST on Thursday, March 8th. A cash prize of up to $40,000 will be awarded to the first contest entrant to find and submit all of the QR codes. According to the challenge website:

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) have issued a joint solicitation for a CISE-MPS Interdisciplinary Faculty Program in Quantum Information Science. The program seeks to “promote research in the area of Quantum Information Science (QIS) by providing resources [that] allow QIS researchers and researchers from the CISE or MPS disciplines to actively engage in joint research efforts.” A specific goal is to encourage long-term visits by faculty to a host institution. From the solicitation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this Blog by Amr El Abbadi, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Christos Faloutsos, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Mohamed Mokbel, Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  The trio recently organized a National Science Foundation-funded workshop on Social Networks and Mobility in the Cloud. The NSF workshop on Social Networks and Mobility in the Cloud was held in Arlington, VA, on February 23-24. With more than 35 participants from academia, industry, and government, the workshop’s goal was to set the future research directions and challenges that face the […]

We’ve blogged about this topic before, but there’s another terrific article about Internet pioneer and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) founding director Larry Smarr in the March/April 2012 issue of MIT’s Technology Review: Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald’s. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. “In Illinois […]