An interesting story making the rounds this week about researchers who have cracked a centuries-old secret message using statistical translation techniques. From Wired UK: Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort that are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year old secret message.   The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. It’s since been kept in a private collection, and the 105-page, slightly yellowed tome has withheld its secrets ever since.  

Back in February, we noted that the National Science Foundation and Science were partnering to run another International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to celebrate the grand tradition of visualization — specifically for communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. Well, now the submissions are being put to a public vote — with winners to be published in Science and on Science Online. Among this year’s entries are a number of interactive video games that are advancing science and engineering (after the jump):

An interesting example in today’s New York Times about computing in sustainability: …The humble household thermostat.   A boring wall fixture and an unlikely target for innovation? Not to [Tony] Fadell [a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009], his team of 100 computer hardware and software experts and the venture capitalists backing his Silicon Valley start-up, Nest Labs…   Unlike other thermostat manufacturers, Nest Labs has a sizable team of specialists in the branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning, including Yoky Matsuoka, who came from Google and whose work won a MacArthur Foundation award…   They see the conventional thermostat as a dumb […]

Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University (and a member of the CCC Council), and Mary Fernández, Executive Director of Distributed Computing Research at AT&T Research, are among several computing researchers featured on msnbc.com’s Future of Technology website this afternoon — as part of a series of wide-ranging videos about new technologies for emergency response. This last decade has seen one disaster after another hit every corner of the earth. And for each catastrophe, researchers and tech companies have deployed new tools to help search for victims, clear rubble, and aid survivors…   For even faster search and rescue, [researchers] are working on a project […]

In today’s IEEE Spectrum: Imagine if you could conjure up a key piece of knowledge you had forgotten by having a computer summon everything you were seeing, hearing, and doing at the time to help jog your memory. Researchers in Illinois are now developing such technology, which will help people relive the past to search for lost data. The aim of the software, called YouPivot, currently in beta [but expected to be released for Google’s Chrome Web browser in spring 2012], is to find digital information by tapping into how human memory works.   “I like giving the example of searching for your car keys,” says computer scientist Joshua Hailpern […]

Interbots’ consumer robot for autism therapy took the top prize last Thursday at the nation’s first-ever next-generation robotics venture competition. The event, called RoboBowl Pittsburgh (it was held at Carnegie Mellon University), was co-sponsored by the Robotics Technology Consortium and Innovation Accelerator, and sought “to find and foster startup and early-stage companies seeking to develop products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs” in the healthcare sector. Interbots — selected out of five finalists by a panel of judges that included leading roboticists and healthcare professionals from around the country — will receive $20,000 for its top finish. According to the official entry description, Interbots has leveraged recent research findings to create an affordable consumer robot […]