This fall, our colleagues Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are offering a free, online version of their popular Stanford University course, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”: A syllabus and more information about the Stanford course is here…   The class runs from Sept 26 through Dec 16, 2011. While this class is being offered online, it is also taught at Stanford University, where it continues to be a popular intro-level class on AI. For the online version, the instructors aim to offer identical materials, assignments, and exams, and to use the same grading criteria. Both instructors will be available for online discussions.   A high speed internet connection is recommended as most […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) In just a few minutes, Earlier today, during a special session of the National Science Board — and before a large gathering of senior leadership from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), members of the media, and other invited guests — NSF Director Subra Suresh and OSTP Director John Holdren will unveiled the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps), a brand new “public-private partnership aimed at developing a national innovation ecosystem that strategically leverages the output of NSF-funded scientific research to help develop new technologies, products, and processes that benefit society […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) From today’s New York Times: A coalition of 28 American universities is throwing its weight behind a plan to build ultra-high-speed computer networks — with Internet service several hundred times faster than what is now commercially available — in the communities surrounding the participating colleges.   The project, which is named GigU and will be announced on Wednesday, is meant to draw high-tech startups in fields like health care, energy and telecommunications to the areas near the universities, many of which are in the Midwest or outside of major cities. These zones would ideally function as hubs for building […]

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…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a new solicitation for Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE), a Foundation-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF-funded disciplines including CISE. The focus of the this year’s PIRE RFP is on the NSF-wide investment in sustainability (Science, Engineering, and Education of Sustainability, or SEES): Recognizing the value of international partnerships in addressing critical science and engineering questions, NSF established the Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) program in 2005. PIRE is an NSF-wide program that supports fundamental, interdisciplinary, international research and education in physical, living, human, and engineered systems. PIRE enables research at the leading edge of science and […]

At the recent “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, Stanford President John Hennessy stepped through the history of computer architecture, with an eye toward the future — including multicore and multithreading (fine-grained vs. simultaneous). I’m going to try to both take a look backward and then a look forward and talk about what the implications are. “The March of Technology” is indeed a good “uber-title” for this type of talk, because it really is about the dramatic changes and about the inflection point that we passed through, and what some of those inflections are.   Let’s face it: most of the world is not going to […]