Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers.” Noting he’s focused on the year 2020, Johnson had the following to say as part of the Q&A: Q: You study the interaction between humans and computers. What do you foresee in the next 10, 15 years?   B.D.J.: Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we […]

At a meeting of the National Science Board (NSB) yesterday, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Farnam Jahanian announced a new Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project that brings together teams from the U.S. and Japan to pursue fundamental advances in information technology in support of effective disaster management. The new SAVI — to be called Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM) — will foster a global research collaboration focused on (following the link):

For those planning to submit CAREER proposals to NSF/CISE for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program — the CAREER deadline is Monday, July 23rd — NSF has issued the following guidance today: Important Information for SaTC CAREER Proposals!   If you are planning on submitting a CAREER proposal to the CISE Directorate for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, you will find that SaTC is not listed as a program that accepts CAREER proposals. Please be advised that all CAREER SaTC proposals to the CISE Directorate should be submitted to the to the Trustworthy Computing (TC) program. If this procedure is followed, your CAREER proposal will be managed by SaTC staff.  

We’ve previously covered Internet pioneer and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) founding director Larry Smarr’s decade-long quest to pursue personal health instrumentation — and there’s another great article in this month’s Atlantic shedding light on Smarr’s work, as well as his thinking about the future of healthcare (emphasis added): He is not a doctor or a biochemist, he’s a computer scientist — one of the early architects of the Internet, in fact. Today he directs a world-class research center on two University of California campuses, San Diego and Irvine, called the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or “Calit2” (the 2 represents the repeated I and T initials). The future is arriving faster at Calit2 than it […]

At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added): “Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test. […]

Yesterday we blogged in this space about a ‘big data’ briefing held in downtown Washington, DC, earlier this week, one that emphasized the exponential growth in data that we are witnessing with each passing day. IBM Research’s David McQueeney noted how corporations recognize there are huge opportunities if they can “master the tsunami of data.” Well, what about something as simple as one’s e-reader? We can assume these days that if a device is digital, then it is tracking and storing information about its user. So how can an e-reader help businesses grow — and what are the consequences for consumers? The Wall Street Journal has published an interesting article — “Your E-Book is […]