On March 26, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic published an article titled Which College – and Which Major – Will Make You Richest?  The article provides the full methodology and explanations of the study done by PayScale.  What we found most interesting is the information on degrees.  Nine of the top 10 degrees with the highest return on investment are computer science programs.     …no degree in America is more valuable than a computer-science major at Stanford, Columbia, or Berkeley. Notably, the most valuable non-computer-science major in the country is also at Stanford: economics.

NSF is holding a webinar on Thursday, April 3, 2014 – 2:30 pm EDT to share information about the recently released solicitation, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Please register here  by 11:59pm EDT on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. From the NSF announcement available here: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components. Advances in CPS will enable capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability that will far exceed the simple embedded systems of today. CPS technology will transform the way people interact with engineered systems — just as the Internet has transformed the way people interact with information. […]

In an article on Robohub, Gill Pratt, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, shares his thoughts on advances and changes in the robotics field. Pratt talked about the importance of cloud computing in robotics: Perhaps most exciting for the future of cloud computing in robotics is that when one robot learns how to perceive something, or learns how to do a particular task, that learning can be instantly shared with other robots. This sharing could have a catalytic effect on the capabilities of robots, particularly in structured environments.   … If you look at the research being done we see a lot of possibilities with cloud computing for robots. […]

A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Brandeis University have provided the first experimental evidence that validates Alan Turing’s theory of morphogenesis, more than 60 years after his death. Turing is well known for his contributions to computer science, he set in motion the computer age and his World War II codebreaking helped turn the tide of the Second World War. Turing also developed theories in biology and chemistry.  In his only paper in biology, Turing proposed a theory of morphogenesis, or how identical copies of a single cell differentiate, for example, into an organism with arms and legs, a head and tail. A press release from the […]

Earlier this month, the SXSW interactive conference held a session on Cloud Robotics: Instant Scalability and Capability. The panel was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal as one of the moments that stood out at the conference: The implications are vast: Robots could draw on the experiences of other robots to better perform tasks such as customer service or even surgery. Self-driving cars could be connected to a global library of maps and real-time traffic data. There could even be a robot app store for machines to instantly get new capabilities.   Robots could also become better human companions, since they would be constantly learning from the examples of others, […]

The CCC congratulates Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research on receiving the 2013 ACM Turing Award for advances in reliability and consistency of computing systems. From the Microsoft Website: The path to greatness begins with baby steps, and for Lamport, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, that teenage curiosity has yet to be quenched. Over the ensuing decades, he has become a veritable legend in computing circles. His work in the theory of distributed computing is foundational. His 1978 paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is one of the most cited in the history of computer science. And he has contributed core principles to the field of […]