Beginning at 1pm EDT this afternoon, the World Science Festival — an annual celebration and exploration of science, culture, and art that’s taking place all across New York City this week  — will stream live from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a 90-minute session titled “Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”: Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the Internet. Pioneers of the digital revolution examine the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other. From social upheaval […]

A number of news outlets have begun covering Plan X, a new five-year, $110 million cyberwarfare research program that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to launch this summer. According to The Washington Post, which broke the news earlier this week: The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.   The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on […]

Ahead of the Alan Turing Centenary next month, SD Times has published an interesting retrospective describing Turing’s influence on the field: Turing’s birthday — June 23, 1912 — will be marked by worldwide celebrations. The Association for Computing Machinery is hosting its Turing Centenary Celebration on June 15 and 16 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco…   The Turing Award, first given in 1966, is handed out each year to one or more individuals for their contributions of a technical nature to the computing community. The award also includes a US$250,000 prize.   In speaking with past winners of the Turing Award and others who have used his research as a starting point for their […]

A little over two years ago, we blogged about the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) biennial employment outlook — a 10-year forecast of job growth in all occupations — noting the prominence of computing in the decade ahead. Well, earlier this year, BLS released a new employment outlook for the period 2010-2020, and computing was once again front and center: Computer and mathematical occupations are projected to add 778,300 new jobs between 2010 and 2020, after having added 229,600 new jobs from 2006 to 2010. This represents 22.0 percent growth from 2010 to 2020…   Employment in the computer systems design and related services industry is projected to add 671,300 jobs, to reach […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has developed a new website for undergraduates seeking summer research opportunities as well as advice and tips on applying for graduate school. The website is called CS URGE (CS Undergraduate Research and Graduate Education), and the URL is http://cra.org/ccc/csurge. We URGE you to promote CS URGE with your students and place a link to the site from your departmental website. In addition to sections on “What is CS Research” and “Why Go to Graduate School?”, the site contains links to many undergraduate summer research programs (e.g., NSF REU, CRA-W, and many others) as well as a free service where researchers can post summer research opportunities […]

From Google’s Research Blog this afternoon: Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…