On the heels of Saturday’s New York Times‘ story about iRobot, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a feature today describing how a pair of computing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are programming “robot teachers” that can gaze and gesture like humans. According to the NSF piece: When it comes to communication, sometimes it’s our body language that says the most — especially when it comes to our eyes.   “It turns out that gaze tells us all sorts of things about attention, about mental states, about roles in conversations,” says Bilge Mutlu, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Mutlu … a human-computer interaction specialist … and his […]

Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting. From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):