On Wednesday afternoon, before a standing-room-only audience in downtown DC, IBM Corp. held a briefing titled “Big Data: The New Natural Resource.” During it, David McQueeney, vice president for software at IBM Research, described how corporate leaders increasingly appreciate the move toward ‘big data’ — but the field itself has not yet reached a point at which it can efficiently capture, integrate, and analyze these data and make results available to decision makers in a timely fashion. Yet decision makers know that a huge opportunity is presenting itself, if only they can “master the tsunami of data,” as McQueeney said. Indeed, McQueeney noted that the tidal wave of data is only […]

In the July Scientific American, Caltech electrical engineering and computer science professor Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa describes recent advances in machine learning: A couple of years ago the directors of a women’s clothing company asked me to help them develop better fashion recommendations for their clients. No one in their right mind would seek my personal advice in an area I know so little about — I am, after all, a male computer scientist — but they were not asking for my personal advice. They were asking for my machine-learning advice, and I obliged. Based purely on sales figures and client surveys, I was able to recommend to women whom I have never […]

On the heels of Francis Collins’s Scientific American article about mobile health apps, Technology Review has an interesting interview with MIT Media Lab associate professor Pattie Maes about the future of human-computer interaction in light of recent advances in mobile technologies: What will smart phones be like five years from now?   Phones may know not just where you are but that you are in a conversation, and who you are talking to, and they may make certain information and documents available based on what conversation you’re having. Or they may silence themselves, knowing that you’re in an interview [more following the link].  

A nice article on The New York Times‘s Bits Blog yesterday, about Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his Duolingo experiment: Language does not come naturally to machines. Unlike humans, computers cannot easily distinguish between, say, a river bank and a savings bank. Satire and jokes? Algorithms have great trouble with that. Irony? Wordplay? Cultural context? Forget it.   That human edge in decoding what things mean is what a computer scientist turned entrepreneur, Luis von Ahn, is betting on. His start-up, Duolingo, which opened to the public on Tuesday, proposes to put armies of language learners to work translating text on the Web [more following the […]

As we described in this space yesterday, this morning at an event at the White House, the Obama Administration will formally launch the US Ignite Broadband Initiative, an at-scale, nationwide innovation ecosystem for developing and deploying public sector applications and services on ultra-high-speed, software-defined networks. The announcement will be streamed live beginning at 9am EDT — and we’ll cover it below (more after the jump…).

(This post has been updated; scroll down for the latest.) At a White House event Thursday morning, the Administration will formally announce new steps to expand and improve access to next-generation broadband technologies and applications — including the launch of US Ignite, a new public-private partnership spanning more than 100 members that will seek to bring together computing researchers, software and application developers, broadband carriers, and broadband users so that they can take advantage of ultra-high-speed, programmable broadband networks. The US Ignite partnership is being largely convened by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the support of other Federal agencies, industry, non-profits, and local communities. Its key mission will be to leverage NSF’s […]