Every week for the last several years, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has showcased an interesting computing (or related) research project as a “Highlight of the Week.” Today, in an effort to build upon the success of the Highlight feature, we are announcing an expanded version of this series called “Computing Research in Action.”

With the start of the 2012-13 school year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday released the first issue of the second volume of CS Bits & Bytes, focusing on biomimetic robotics, relating optimal control to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The issue highlights the work of Emanuel Todorov’s Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington, includes links to related videos, and contains a culminating activity that asks students to define performance metrics for sports, helping them realize all that must go into optimal control and performance. CS Bits & Bytes is a biweekly newsletter developed to make computer science more accessible to educators and learners around the world. Each issue of CS […]

Technology writer Steve Lohr had a great piece about the future of computing — and other fields — in The New York Times yesterday: TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.   Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism [more following the link…]. […]

We’ve blogged extensively in this space over the last few months about the promise of Big Data science and engineering, including stories describing how very large data sets coupled with predictive analytics capabilities are transforming the way we use e-readers or leverage medical records to drive advances in healthcare. Now here’s an interesting new angle — the world of sports. For all you tennis fans out there, IBM has launched a new analytics tool at this year’s US Open — SlamTracker — to help individuals better understand what’s happening on the courts in Flushing, NY. SlamTracker uses nearly 40 million data points from five years of Grand Slam tournaments to analyze and present each competitor’s performance styles and patterns […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenny Korn, a Ph.D. student in communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Korn was one of the participants of last week’s 2012 Summer Social Webshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation, co-organized by Alan Neustadtl, Jennifer Preece, and Ben Shneiderman, faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park, as well as Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation. Chosen from more than 100 applications, 50 doctoral students gathered at the University of Maryland last week for the Summer Social Webshop (the website includes videos of presentations!). The well-crafted presentations triggered lively discussions at the intersection of social media and network analysis. We represented many disciplines, including communications, sociology, information science, […]

NBC Learn — the educational arm of NBC News — is out with a new video about crowdsourcing, featuring Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his work with CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and, most recently, Duolingo. The video — part of a “Science Behind the News” video series developed in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore advances in science and technology making the news — describes von Ahn’s efforts to digitize books and translate the web into foreign languages. Check out the clip after the jump…