New Scientist published an interesting story last week describing how Watson — the IBM question-answering supercomputer that bested the world’s leading human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — is blazing new trails in medicine, learning how to help doctors diagnose patients: IT IS more than a year since Watson, IBM’s famous supercomputer, opened a new frontier for artificial intelligence by beating human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Now Watson is learning to use its language skills to help doctors diagnose patients.   Progress is most advanced in cancer care, where IBM is working with several US hospitals to build a virtual physicians’ assistant. “It’s a machine that can read everything and forget nothing,” says Larry Norton, […]

An interesting article in The New York Times this weekend about the resurgence of hardware prototyping in the Bay Area: In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It’s been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones.   But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software.   It is an expansion of a trend that began a few years ago with the Flip videophone, a sleeper hit, and has recently accelerated with Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that refocuses a photo after it is taken; and the Pebble smartwatch, a wristwatch that can interact with a smartphone.   Although the hardware is not […]

In a recent article in The New York Times, the newspaper’s technology writer John Markoff describes how advances in robotics have created new opportunities for automation, citing several examples where improved capabilities and reduced cost are changing the value proposition to industry. As is inevitable, these advances are juxtaposed against the impact on employment — in bald terms, will robots put people out of work?

We’ve featured lots of stories about Big Data over the last several months, but here’s a fascinating new one that illustrates the value of Big Data analytics in addressing important national priorities. Researchers at SENSEable City Lab — a new research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — together with colleagues at GE Healthymagination have analyzed data from over 7 million electronic medical records, illustrating in a powerful visual the (sometimes surprising) relationships between medical conditions on the basis of the frequency of co-occurrences. They’re calling this extensive disease network the “Health InfoScape.” When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a […]

Also in this week’s Nature, a fascinating review of an album of evolved music, composed by the Darwinian computer program Iamus, that is “at the very least musically ‘plausible’”: If a computer can produce an artwork that moves us, does it take artificial intelligence beyond an important threshold? That is one of the questions raised by Iamus, an algorithm that composes music from scratch, developed by Francisco Vico and his colleagues at the University of Malaga in Spain.   Iamus, an album of compositions by the algorithm — including two orchestral pieces played by the London Symphony Orchestra — comes out on 1 September. A live performance of several Iamus pieces […]

There’s a great article in this week’s Nature — out this afternoon — featuring computer scientists like Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg, Harvard’s David Lazer (now at Northeastern), and Columbia’s Duncan Watts, who are leveraging today’s digital data streams (e.g., e-mail, social media, mobile devices, etc.) to transform the way we study social science. Here’s an excerpt about their pioneering efforts in computational social science: Jon Kleinberg’s early work was not for the mathematically faint of heart. His first publication1, in 1992, was a computer-science paper with contents as dense as its title: ‘On dynamic Voronoi diagrams and the minimum Hausdorff distance for point sets under Euclidean motion in the plane’.   That was before the World-Wide Web […]