The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science magazine have announced the 10th International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual competition aims to celebrate the grand tradition of visualizations, in the spirit of communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. There’s a category all about Video Games & Apps — and last year’s winner was Foldit, an entry by University of Washington computer scientists Zoran Popović and Seth Cooper. Judges appointed by NSF and Science will select winners in five categories: Photography, Illustrations, Posters & Graphics, Video Games & Apps, and Videos. The winning entries will appear in a special section of Science (with one entry chosen for the front cover) and be hosted at ScienceMag.org and NSF.gov. In […]

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 […]

Our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have posted a neat montage of the exhibit hall at last week’s 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012) — which featured more than two dozen exhibitors and attracted over 1,700 attendees. The robots at the exhibit hall included the DARPA ARM… NASA’s Robonaut 2, Willow Garage’s PR2, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, and [ReconRobotics, Inc.’s Scout], which is based in Edina, Minn., and brought a makeshift Afghanistan village to the show floor. Though we’ve seen all of these bots before, we’ve learned some new things about each of them. Check it out after the jump…

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Scott Aaronson and Robert Wood, the joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award, visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) last week. In addition to presenting to the National Science Board (NSB) and chatting with NSF staff, they spent some time describing their research projects and experiences to local high school students, as part of an effort to engage and inspire students’ interest in computer science. Wood visited with about 100 students at Yorktown High School in Arlington, VA, while Aaronson spoke to about 150 students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) in Alexandria, VA. At Yorktown, Wood […]

Scott Aaronson and Robert Wood, the two computer scientists who in March were named joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award, will deliver half-hour presentations about their research to the National Science Board (NSB) later this morning. The presentations are scheduled to begin at 11am EDT, and they will be streamed live via the web as part of an open session during the Board’s meeting (more after the jump).

David Ferrucci, the IBM Research Staff Member who led the development of Watson — the question-answering system that bested human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — recently visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) to describe the fundamental advances underpinning the supercomputer. While there, Ferrucci took a few minutes to sit down for an interview by Helen Hastings, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) in Alexandria, Va., who earlier this year was named one of the recipients of the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s (NCWIT) 2012 Award for Aspirations in Computing. Hastings asked Ferrucci how he assembled his team, the challenges the team faced, what the Watson success means […]