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 […]

As you fill out your March Madness brackets, don’t miss out on your opportunity to win a billion dollars. Predicting a perfect bracket will win you $1,000,000,000 from billionaire Warren Buffet and Quicken Loans. Odds are slim to win the grand prize (1 in 4,294,967,296), but Computer Scientists and Mathematicians are working on ways to increase those odds. Computer Science Professor Sheldon Jacobson and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been working on BracketOdds since 2011.  BracketOdds is a tool that uses principles from probability theory and operations research to model the likelihood that a set of seeds will reach a particular round of the tournament. Jacobson and his team […]

The White House is now accepting applications for the third round of Presidential Innovation Fellows. Applications are due April 7, 2014. Click here to apply. The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program brings the principles, values, and practices of the innovation economy into government through the most effective agents of change we know: our people. This highly-competitive program pairs talented, diverse individuals from the innovation community with top civil servants to tackle many of our Nation’s biggest challenges, and to achieve a profound and lasting social impact. These teams of government experts and private-sector doers are taking a “lean startup” approach and applying methods like user-centered design to achieve results for the […]