The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) announced last week its intention to issue, perhaps in December, a solicitation for Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), with the goal of investigating “innovative approaches that automatically create games capable of transforming formal verification problems into compelling games for end users to play.” From the official notification: Currently, formal program verification is not widely practiced due to high costs and the fact that fundamental program verification problems resist automation. This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) MIT’s Technology Review has an in-depth interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and Eric Horvitz, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (and a member of the CCC Council), about their optimism for the future of AI: Google and Microsoft don’t share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals can agree on some things — like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology.   [Norvig and Horvitz] recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise […]

Last week in Seattle a record attendance of more than 11,000 people from throughout the world met at the Seattle Convention Center for SC11 — the largest international supercomputing conference focusing on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis through a large industrial and research exhibition and a highly peer reviewed technical program (which was attended by almost 5,000 people this year). The conference keynote presentation was given by Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA®.

Among the 10 world-changing ideas we featured earlier today is the “forever health monitor,” i.e., the ability to exploit today’s technology to quickly, easily, and fairly inexpensively monitor our own vital signs in real time, so that we may pinpoint the first signs of trouble as they arise. It turns out one man — Internet pioneer and founding director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) Larry Smarr — has been doing exactly that for the past 10 years. And for all his personal health instrumentation efforts, Xconomy has named Larry its Xconomist of the Week: In the 10 years since he moved to San Diego to become founding director of the [University of California] system’s [CalIT2], […]

In the December 2011 issue of Scientific American: Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.   What other simple but revolutionary ideas are out there in the labs, waiting for the right moment to make it big? We have found 10, and … we explain what they are and how they might shake things […]

Last month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a new multi-disciplinary program — Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) — seeking proposals that address cybersecurity needs. SaTC replaces NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program, expanding support within the Foundation to include, in addition to the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Late yesterday, in an effort to help researchers interested in cybersecurity understand the opportunities being made available through SaTC, NSF announced that it will hold a webinar about the new program on Friday, December 2, 2011, at 1pm EST. From the official solicitation: […]