The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 83 new members and 16 foreign members. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. Many of the newly elected members work in fields related to computer science. Here are a few of them: Oussama Khatib, director of the Stanford Robotics Lab, and professor, department of computer science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For contributions to the understanding, analysis, control, and design of robotic systems operating in complex, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Jayadev Misra, Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, University of Texas, Austin. For contributions to the theory and practice of software […]

National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity will be in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20418) on March 13-14, 2018. Our ambition is to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering. We believe that internet-enabled collaborations can make more people more creative more of the time. 50 years ago in an era of political turmoil, the artistic response was captured in a famed exhibit on Cybernetic Serendipity that celebrated how individual artists could creatively transform computers into art machines. The rock star artists entranced 40,000 viewers with never-before seen images, […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Laura Major, the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works. Major was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for her paper, Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges.  The Idea Autonomy is moving into commercial applications, where it is being encountered by untrained, unfamiliar consumers. These individuals, with little exposure to autonomy or its principles, will be using advanced automation to perform safety-critical tasks such as driving their cars or flying video-capture drones. While advanced automation has been applied in industrial applications for decades, with experts using it to monitor and control highly […]

Professor Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego will present “Modern Automotive Vulnerabilities: Problems, Causes, and Outcomes,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture series on February 8, 2018, from 2:00PM to 3:00PM ET. Stefan Savage is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie Mellon University. Savage is a full-time empiricist, whose research interests lie at the intersection of computer security, distributed systems and networking.  He currently serves as co-director of UCSD’s Center […]

For weeks we have been recapping the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium from the perspective of the researchers and industry representatives who presented their work on each panel. This week, we are getting a different perspective. The goal of the final panel, called Connecting Computing Research with National Priorities and moderated by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, was to get a perspective from people who have or are currently serving in government. The panelists included: Will Barkis, from Orange Silicon Valley, shared a Silicon Valley perspective and called for increasing investment in basic research and development to benefit society as well as support innovation in industry. He emphasized that collaboration […]

The terms superposition, entanglement, and interference might sound like they are from a superhero movie, but they are in fact very important terms in the field of quantum computing. Quantum computing is very different from classical digital on/off computing, which you might be more familiar with. It relies on the principles of quantum mechanics to compute and uses these terms to store information in a quantum state. Recently, the Microsoft Research Podcast interviewed Microsoft Principal Research Manager, Dr. Krysta Svore about her field of quantum computing. In the podcast, Svore talks about how quantum computing can do so much more than digital computing. With quantum algorithms we can “solve real […]