Leslie Valiant, the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award for his “transformative contributions to the theory of computation,” delivered the Turing Lecture at the 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference, held in San Jose, CA, in early June. Valiant’s lecture — titled “The Extent and the Limitations of Mechanistic Explanations of Nature” — is now online (after the jump):

A couple months ago, I blogged about David Ferrucci’s excellent keynote at this year’s Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Jose, CA — noting how Ferrucci stepped through the creation of Watson, from conception of the “Jeopardy!” challenge in 2004 to the supercomputer’s nationally televised victory earlier this year. Well, now, ACM has made Ferrucci’s talk — along with the rest of this year’s FCRC plenaries — available through its Digital Library free of cost. Simply click here and create a free profile to either download or stream the 40-minute presentation.   And read the original summary of Ferrucci’s talk after the jump…

One of mankind’s oldest dreams is to fly like a bird. And now, thanks to a team of German researchers, we’ve moved one step closer with SmartBird — the first ultralight artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird. Inspired by the herring gull, SmartBird is capable of taking off and rising in the air by virtue of its flapping wings alone. It’s so lifelike that even real birds are seemingly taken by it. Markus Fischer, head of corporate design at Festo, a company that specializes in pneumatic and electrical automation technology, showed off SmartBird at the 2011 TEDGlobal Conference in Edinburgh last week. Check out the amazing video — just […]

We’ve covered the US Ignite and Gig.U initiatives on this blog over the course of the past few months, and now we’ve been pointed to a great video that explains, in fairly concrete terms, exactly what high-capacity networking means for everyday consumers. The video was produced by our friends at the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) — but the key points are applicable to the U.S. just the same. I encourage you to watch the 7-minute video after the jump…

A few months ago, we announced a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science — with the goal of communicating to undergraduates what computing research is all about. The first of these videos, titled Exploring PhotoBios, debuted in mid-June. Today I’m pleased to present the second of these videos — about Seattle, a new testbed platform that allows researchers to access computational resources on a wide variety of devices and machines provided by everyday users. Users today are increasingly running applications on devices like cell phones and tablets. Similarly, companies are increasingly moving services to separately managed services like the cloud or content distribution networks (CDNs). However, […]

We’ve all heard about Cannes.  And Sundance.  And perhaps Slamdance.  But have you heard about the Robot Film Festival? This past weekend, a huge crowd of roboticists, artists, and filmakers converged on Manhattan for the world’s first-ever Robot Film Festival. Dubbed a two-day celebration of robots on film, the event sought “to inject a sense of playfulness into traditional science and engineering and explore frontiers before technically feasible.” Over 50 short films were screened, and the official awards ceremony saw 3D-printed “Botsker” statuettes presented to “Best Robot Actor,” “Most Uncanny,” and the like in a unique black-tie, red-carpet gala. See some of the short films after the jump…