An feature in Computerworld last week takes an in-depth look at the “widely predicted Internet of Things (IoT), where anything with intelligence (including machines, roads, and buildings) will have an online presence, generating data that could be put to uses currently unimagined.” From the article: Dave Evans, chief futurist at Cisco… predicts 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and social networks to connect them. “In the coming years, anything that has an on-off switch will be on the network,” he says. “I foresee it in just about every industry and stream of life.”   The deluge has already begun.   “There are several industries where [the Internet of Things] is happening, and some […]

For those who may have missed it, an article in last week’s Bloomberg Businessweek — under the heading “creating chips that learn and respond as they gain experience” — described recent and ongoing advances in AI, cognition, and human-computer interaction: In a windowless room deep inside IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists are teaching a computer chip to learn from what it sees, much like a human.   The effort is paying off, if performance at Pong is any measure. When the chip, part of a project called SyNAPSE, first learned to play the classic videogame in March, it did poorly. Weeks later, the company reports, it was nearly unbeatable.   […]

In today’s Washington Post Magazine, Dennis Hong, director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech and “a leader in the movement to perfect the humanoid robot,” gets profiled: In the movies, robots are everywhere, boxing and shooting and running and flying and generally outdoing humans at every turn. In reality, the humanoid robot has a long way to go. Simply powering an autonomous robot is a nightmare; current battery technology allows a robot maybe 20 minutes of life, and (as one of Hong’s students told me) if you poke the power cell with a pencil, it will explode. Visual sensors are costly and erratic. The simple human act of walking […]

Most of us have sat down to dinner and wondered just how many calories we are about to consume. Now, thanks to undergraduate researchers at Harvard University, there’s a way to do it quickly, easily, and quite reliably — all with the simple snap of a photo and the reliance of the crowd. According to Harvard’s press release: Americans spend upwards of $40 billion a year on dieting advice and self-help books, but the first step in any healthy eating strategy is basic awareness—what’s on the plate.   If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at Harvard have devised a tool that lets […]

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed new software that helps identify anomalies in complex financial data, in hopes of detecting problematic financial trends that jeopardize U.S. and global financial systems. It’s a great example of the kinds of research opportunities at the intersection of computer science and finance. From the official DoE press release: Identifying atypical information in financial data early could help identify problematic financial trends such as the systemic risk that recently put the U.S. and global financial systems in a downward fall. Recognizing such anomalous information can also help regulators, investors and advisors better manage their investment and savings portfolios.   […]

Before a packed room of leading government officials, technologists, and journalists in downtown Washington this morning, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano stressed the need for a new public-private partnership framework that enables innovation and workforce development in cybersecurity in order to adequately protect our nation’s interests from cyber attacks. The event — Cybersecurity Breakfast: Protecting Our Nation’s Assets — was sponsored in part by Washington Post Live, the live journalism arm of The Washington Post Co., and held at the newspaper company’s headquarters. Napolitano described the cybersecurity challenge in her opening remarks: The risks to national and economic security from cyberspace affect us all. So we begin by saying that […]