A great article about iRobot Corporation — and a glimpse into the past and future in robotics — in today’s New York Times: Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.   Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.”   Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and […]

We’ve blogged about this topic before, but there’s another terrific article about Internet pioneer and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) founding director Larry Smarr in the March/April 2012 issue of MIT’s Technology Review: Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald’s. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. “In Illinois […]

From Computerworld: Scientists at IBM Research today said they have achieved a major advance in quantum computing that will allow engineers to begin work on creating a full-scale quantum computer.   The breakthrough allowed scientists to reduce data error rates in elementary computations while maintaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits of data, known as qubits.   The creation of a quantum computer would mean data processing power would be exponentially increased over what is possible with today’s conventional CPUs, according to Mark Ketchen, the manager of physics of information at the IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.  

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced plans for its annual Spring Review, featuring work funded by AFOSR over the past year, as well as discussion of trends and plans for future basic research programs of interest to the Air Force. This year’s Spring Review will be held March 5-9 in Arlington, VA. The first two days of the event will be focused on the efforts of the Mathematics, Information, and Life Sciences Directorate, with talks spanning information and complex systems, decision making, and dynamical systems, control, optimization, and computational mathematics. Relevant portions of the schedule appear following the link:

Early last Saturday morning, I had the privilege and pleasure of organizing and moderating a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The 90-minute session — titled Data to Knowledge to Action: Computational Science in a Global Knowledge Society — sought to describe how advances in computing research are enabling a “data to knowledge to action” pipeline that is increasingly critical for facilitating a 21st-century global knowledge society. Over 70 people packed into a small room in the Vancouver Convention Center to hear the session’s featured speakers, Eric Horvitz, Peter Stone, and Deborah Estrin (slide shows after the jump).

Beginning at 8:15am EST today, we will be streaming live via the web an all-day symposium — titled The Impact of NITRD: Two Decades of Game-Changing Breakthroughs in Networking and Information Technology — marking two decades of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Watch it live following the link!