In today’s New York Times‘ weekly “Science Times,” science writer John Markoff pens a feature about the state of robotics research — including the many challenges to enabling robots to mimic humans’ basic capabilities of motion and perception. The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.   The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than IBM’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.   Although […]

Here’s another great talk — by Tony DeRose, Senior Scientist and head of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios — at the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration. DeRose stepped through the 80-year history of computer animation, with examples from Beauty and the Beast, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, etc. Animation started about 80 years ago… with the Walt Disney Studio, where they really invented what later became an art form. Steamboat Willie was one of the first milestones, and, in this era, the only real technology was pencil, paper, and film. So, the artist would draw a complete drawing, including outlines and shading, for […]

A superb talk by Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, at TED ’11. “The mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow … We need an integrated system that uses real-time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale.” Start at 8:10 after the jump…

Earlier this week, Google released a new report on energy innovation, in which it imagined a number of different possible energy scenarios for the U.S. Google concluded that energy innovation can grow the U.S. economy by $155 billion/year, create 1.1 million new net jobs, and save consumers almost $1000/year, while simultaneously reducing our oil consumption by 1.1 billion barrels/year and our green house emissions by 13%. The report didn’t delve into any specific technological breakthroughs — though we can all think of the many ways in which IT R&D is key here: Since predicting the probability, timing and magnitude of breakthroughs is likely to be impossible we assumed breakthroughs as fact and […]

Artificial intelligence, the holy grail of computer science for decades, is becoming a reality — not Skynet nor Cylons, but as a versatile tool for some types of complex problems, the kinds of problems with which our squishy, human brains struggle. (Cue the “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords” cubicle stickers.) In an article (free registration required) in New Scientist this week, a new way of problem-solving — one in which humans help machines — is discussed. Already widely-used examples include reCAPTCHA (the clever OCR crowdsourcer) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but ambitious plans from Dafna Shahaf and Eric Horvitz (a member of the CCC Council) would create a labor pool […]

NSF/CISE Assistant Director Farnam Jahanian has issued the following letter to the community, describing the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) launched last week: Dear CISE Community,   On Friday, in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama announced the plan for major federal investments in next-generation robotics. The National Robotics Initiative (NRI) is a bold program that supports the development and use of robots that work beside, or cooperatively with, people and that enhance individual human capabilities, performance and safety. NSF is the lead agency in this multi-agency program that also includes NASA, NIH and USDA. NRI calls for cross-agency investments of up to $70 million in the first year […]