The International Society for Technology in Education (ITSE), in partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), is out with an outstanding four-minute video — Computational Thinking: A Digital Age Skill for Everyone — providing an introduction to computational thinking. It’s part of the ITSE’s recent efforts to develop an operational definition for CT, generate booklets for teachers and leaders, and develop a toolkit for presentations or meetings with educators and parents. To describe computational thinking, the video highlights how advances in computing research are changing our everyday lives — from tracking and preventing crime to efficiently managing the global food supply, from detecting illnesses in rural […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) will host the CCC Council’s very own Fred Schneider at 1pm EST today as part of its 60th Anniversary Commemorative Seminar Series. In a talk titled “Cybersecurity: Technology and Policy,” Fred will describe his research supporting “the construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity and mission-critical settings with a focus on fault-tolerance and security.” More details, including a link to a live web feed of the talk, after the jump…

For those who may have missed it, an article in last week’s Bloomberg Businessweek — under the heading “creating chips that learn and respond as they gain experience” — described recent and ongoing advances in AI, cognition, and human-computer interaction: In a windowless room deep inside IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists are teaching a computer chip to learn from what it sees, much like a human.   The effort is paying off, if performance at Pong is any measure. When the chip, part of a project called SyNAPSE, first learned to play the classic videogame in March, it did poorly. Weeks later, the company reports, it was nearly unbeatable.   […]

Sam Madden, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), delivered a great talk about “The Rise of Mobile Data” at the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration earlier this year. Madden described his work in the area of sensor data analytics — specifically location analytics — which seeks to understand, make sense of, and process the wealth of data our smartphones are generating, all the while providing users control over privacy. [There are] going to be five billion cellphones in service in the world in 2011. That’s a pretty staggering number… there’s something like 6.8 billion people […]

As part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative funded by DARPA and involving academic collaborators, Dharmendra Modha and his colleagues at IBM Research – Almaden have designed an experimental computer chip that emulates the brain’s cognitive powers. It’s a revelation that’s got the popular press abuzz today. From the IBM press release: In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.   Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be […]

Ever tried baking — yes, baking — and found it challenging? Well, try teaching it to a robot. That’s just what a group of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have done. Graduate student Mario Bollini, a member of Daniela Rus’s Distributed Robotics Lab, has spent the past several months programming the R&D platform PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage to bake cookies from scratch: While the project was originally intended as a simple introductory project, it has turned out to be quite challenging due to all of the nuances involved with programming a robot to follow a lengthy list of tasks, while also employing vision, object […]