What is it with disasters? They’re coming fast and furious. Here’s the 411 on robots at the China quake. The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there […]

John Markoff had an extremely interesting profile of DARPA Director Regina Dugan in today’s NY Times.  Be sure to read it, here. This follows on the heels of Dr. Dugan’s impressive and heartening House Armed Services Committee testimony, blogged here, and a Computing Research News article by Lazowska and Patterson describing “New Directions at DARPA,” here. Here’s my favorite paragraph from Dr. Dugan’s HASC testimony: “Upon arrival at DARPA, we were determined to understand and repair the breach with universities. We discovered the following: Between 2001 and 2008, DARPA funding to US research university performers did decrease in real terms, by about half. But, as importantly, a noble and recent […]

Those of you who haven’t taken a look at the GENI project in the last year or two need to do so. The name is the same, but the project is totally different, and totally right-headed.  Teams of top researchers are building a diverse suite of tools and technologies that will allow a broad range of networking research experiments to be carried out.  As an example, a set of research universities and research backbone networks are in the process of rolling out Stanford’s OpenFlow switches, which will allow novel low-level protocols to be run alongside TCP/IP.  More than 200 research leaders attended the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, held March 16-17 […]

If there is any doubt in your mind (or even if there is not!), read the testimony delivered by Regina Dugan to the House Armed Services Committee on March 23.  It’s here.  Mind-blowing!

The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy seeks comments on a proposed initiative for student-led innovations in broadband applications. In doing so, OSTP leads with CCC’s “Landmark Contributions by Students in Computer Science“: “Students have contributed some of the most important advances in information and communications technologies—including data compression, interactive computer graphics, Ethernet, Berkeley Unix, the spreadsheet, public key cryptography, speech recognition, Mosaic, and Google.  Today, with the right kind of support, students can play the role of innovators again — by leading the way in the development of broadband applications. In the same way that Mosaic and Google drove demand for today’s Internet, new applications could drive […]

The National Science Foundation is commencing a national search for the NSF’s Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and seeks your assistance in the identification of candidates. The Assistant Director for CISE leads a directorate comprised of three divisions: Computing and Communication Foundations; Computer and Network Systems; and Information and Intelligent Systems.  The CISE directorate is also a major contributor to NSF’s cyberinfrastructure investments through the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The search committee will be headed by Dr. Susan Graham, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  The qualifications for the Assistant Director include: outstanding leadership; a deep […]