Word surfaced last week of a new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, expected to be issued shortly. First reported by Hizook and later confirmed by Wired, the new Grand Challenge calls for “a humanoid robot (with a bias toward bipedal designs) that can be used in rough terrain and for industrial disasters.” According to the Wired report: Brace yourself, because that era might be here sooner than you think: The Pentagon agency behind some of the most important robotics research will soon challenge experts worldwide to come up with humanoid robots that can navigate their environment and handle tools with near-Homo sapiens skill.  

Later today, the Department of Energy (DoE) — together with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Itron, and Gridwise Alliance — will launch the Apps for Energy competition, “challenging developers to use the Green Button data access program to bring residential and commercial utility data to life.” Through the competition, DoE will offer $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers who submit the best apps, as judged by a panel of government officials, energy industry leaders, and information technology experts (more after the jump).

Google unveiled details about its Project Glass initiative Wednesday, attracting quite a bit of buzz in the popular press. In a Google+ post co-authored by Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun: We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.   A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) today announced four new Expeditions in Computing awards, providing each selected project team up to $10 million in funding over five years to pursue “ambitious fundamental research” that will shape “the future of computing and information technologies for decades to come.” Established in 2008, Expeditions from “the centerpiece of the directorate’s award portfolio”; they represent the single largest investments made by the directorate in basic computing research. The four awards announced today “contribute to the program’s rich intellectual portfolio,” according to NSF, “by adding two projects in robotics and smart systems, one project focused on new […]

Our colleagues over at IEEE have published a great piece by G. Pascal Zachary, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, opining on the legacy of recently-departed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan: The most famous name in American innovation today isn’t Apple or Google. Nor is it Facebook, Boeing, or Intel.   The iconic American innovator is a government agency that neither earns a profit nor sells a single consumer product. That DARPA … runs with the big dogs of commercial innovation reflects the importance of science and technology to national security. War, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
..   Since its inception as the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late […]

This week’s Science magazine features two perspectives (subscription required) authored by three computer scientists — Diane Cook (Washington State University), Michael O’Grady (University College Dublin), and Gregory O’Hare (University College Dublin) — describing visions for future “smart” homes and cities and, notably, the computing research challenges that must be addressed for these visions to become reality. In the first piece about smart homes, Cook writes: Individuals spend most of their time in their home or workplace; for many, these places are their sanctuaries. Over the course of the 20th century, technological advances have helped to enhance the comfort and shelter provided by our homes. Insights gained from capturing and modeling behavior in these places may be useful in making […]