I’ve just returned from Japan advising the “Mt. Fuji” team on UAVs for the Fukushima nuclear situation and I’ll be going back next week with a team of experts and robots to assist several prefectures with tsunami damage inspection and the grim task of underwater victim recovery.  (Read more about this in The New York Times.)  This will be the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue’s (CRASAR) twelfth response since the first use of rescue robots at the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse just short of a decade ago. What has changed in rescue robotics in the last 10 years?  The robots, of course!  Rescue robots originally meant small ground vehicles […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Ashok Goel, Associate Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the School of Interactive Computing and Director of the Digital Intelligence Laboratory at Georgia Tech. He co-organized a NSF-funded Bioinspired Design Workshop earlier this month. Examples of bioinspired design are all around us. We see it in Velcro, which was inspired by cockle burrs. We see it in self-cleansing paints that mimic the hydrophobic effect on surfaces of lotus leafs. We see it in robots that can climb vertical walls much like geckos. We see it in the windmill blades that are similar to the tubercles on humpback whale flippers. […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Doug Fisher (Vanderbilt University) and Mary Lou Maher (University of Maryland, College Park), who recently co-organized the AAAI 2011 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Design. About 25-30 people attended the first-ever AAAI Spring Symposium on AI and Sustainable Design held on March 21-23, 2011 at Stanford University. They came from three primary areas: AI and Design Computational Sustainability Design for Sustainability There was also a virtual participation option, which was made available to co-authors, colleagues, and students of the authors of the papers as a way of broadening participation without requiring additional travel — and as a result […]

Earlier this year, the NAE and IOM, along with Health 2.0, announced a challenge for college students throughout the U.S., to create new apps or tools that use large quantities of newly available health data: Using social networking, mobile apps, and other new technologies, how can the power of health data be unleashed to increase awareness of health problems and inspire positive action at the community level? Are you motivated to improve our nation’s health? Using new and fun technologies you can make a difference. Interactive tools and apps, tapping into vast amounts of newly available health data, now can be used in engaging and empowering ways to lead to better health.   […]

The National Science Board (NSB) held an Expert Panel Discussion on Data Policies at the National Science Foundation yesterday & today, exploring the opportunities and challenges of a future rooted in data-intensive science and engineering.  Organized by the NSB’s Task Force on Data Policies, the meeting included leading figures in the scientific enterprise across the U.S., the U.K., and Germany.  A key goal was to identify guiding principles for establishing policies on data and artifacts (such as codes). The experts assembled by the NSB described the wealth of opportunities, including entirely new types of science, that stand to be enabled by data-intensive S&E — by virtue of opening up vast new sources […]

Many of us have completed our share of March Madness brackets, competing in leagues or pools to see who can be best at predicting the outcome of the annual NCAA Tournament.  For the second year in a row, University of Toronto machine learning Ph.D. student Danny Tarlow has organized and run one such pool.  But what makes Tarlow’s pool unique — and noteworthy here — is that all entries are computer-generated, i.e., the entries are brackets completed by computer algorithms working off of historial data and without the use of any human judgment.  Tarlow calls it the March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge, and the rules he’s defined tell the story: Your bracket must be […]