An interesting example in today’s New York Times about computing in sustainability: …The humble household thermostat.   A boring wall fixture and an unlikely target for innovation? Not to [Tony] Fadell [a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009], his team of 100 computer hardware and software experts and the venture capitalists backing his Silicon Valley start-up, Nest Labs…   Unlike other thermostat manufacturers, Nest Labs has a sizable team of specialists in the branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning, including Yoky Matsuoka, who came from Google and whose work won a MacArthur Foundation award…   They see the conventional thermostat as a dumb […]

Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University (and a member of the CCC Council), and Mary Fernández, Executive Director of Distributed Computing Research at AT&T Research, are among several computing researchers featured on msnbc.com’s Future of Technology website this afternoon — as part of a series of wide-ranging videos about new technologies for emergency response. This last decade has seen one disaster after another hit every corner of the earth. And for each catastrophe, researchers and tech companies have deployed new tools to help search for victims, clear rubble, and aid survivors…   For even faster search and rescue, [researchers] are working on a project […]

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 […]

In today’s IEEE Spectrum: Imagine if you could conjure up a key piece of knowledge you had forgotten by having a computer summon everything you were seeing, hearing, and doing at the time to help jog your memory. Researchers in Illinois are now developing such technology, which will help people relive the past to search for lost data. The aim of the software, called YouPivot, currently in beta [but expected to be released for Google’s Chrome Web browser in spring 2012], is to find digital information by tapping into how human memory works.   “I like giving the example of searching for your car keys,” says computer scientist Joshua Hailpern […]

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Deputy Director Tom Kalil and Senior Advisor Kumar Garg have highlighted the role of fundamental computing research in many of the breakthrough technologies we now use on a daily basis — using as an example Siri, the powerful new tool that Apple has deployed in its latest handset, the iPhone 4S: Apple earlier this month announced that a virtual personal assistant called Siri would be the premier feature of the new iPhone 4S. People will be able to ask Siri to book a table at a nearby restaurant, make an appointment with a friend or colleague or answer a question using the information from multiple […]

Interbots’ consumer robot for autism therapy took the top prize last Thursday at the nation’s first-ever next-generation robotics venture competition. The event, called RoboBowl Pittsburgh (it was held at Carnegie Mellon University), was co-sponsored by the Robotics Technology Consortium and Innovation Accelerator, and sought “to find and foster startup and early-stage companies seeking to develop products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs” in the healthcare sector. Interbots — selected out of five finalists by a panel of judges that included leading roboticists and healthcare professionals from around the country — will receive $20,000 for its top finish. According to the official entry description, Interbots has leveraged recent research findings to create an affordable consumer robot […]