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 […]

We’ve covered the US Ignite and Gig.U initiatives on this blog over the course of the past few months, and now we’ve been pointed to a great video that explains, in fairly concrete terms, exactly what high-capacity networking means for everyday consumers. The video was produced by our friends at the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) — but the key points are applicable to the U.S. just the same. I encourage you to watch the 7-minute video after the jump…

Back in mid-June, we noted the President’s announcement of a $70 million National Robotics Initiative (NRI) — a multi-agency investment spanning the NSF, NIH, NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture — to fund major research advances enabling next-generation robotics. This morning, the White House announced that the Department of Defense is now supporting the NRI as well. In a post on the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog, Tom Kalil, OSTP Deputy Director for Policy, and Chuck Thorpe, OSTP Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, noted:

It’s not everyday the national news media envisions computing research. But it happened on Sunday, when New York Times‘ writer John Markoff penned a story about the future of computer architecture — picking up on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2011) earlier this year that forecast a 24-fold gap from the expectations of Moore’s Law by the year 2024 and concluded, “Regardless of chip organization and topology, multicore scaling is power limited to a degree not widely appreciated by the computing community.” Markoff writes: For decades, the power of computers has grown at a staggering rate as designers have managed to squeeze ever more and ever […]

The NSF’s Science Nation has a great feature today on the “Science of Shopping,” describing how computer scientists Rajeev Sharma and Satish Mummareddy have developed cameras and software that track our shopping behavior in brick-and-mortar stores, with the goal of showing retailers and manufacturers the best areas to place products within stores. Next time you go to a store, take a minute to look at all the things that are trying to grab your attention. With so many products available and so many stores and websites, how do you decide what to buy and where to shop? Whether it’s convenience, good service or finding the best deals, store owners want […]