Last month, we noted that eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf had taken the unprecedented step of resigning from the University of Virginia to protest the ousting of UVa president Teresa Sullivan by the university’s Board of Visitors. The Board reinstated Sullivan as president a week later, and since then, many in our community have wondered if Bill would rejoin the UVa faculty. Bill has maintained his stance despite pleas from his colleagues — faculty and administration alike — including Sullivan herself. Yesterday, he publicly released a letter explaining his rationale for not “un-resigning.” Here it is, in its entirety:

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Louiqa Raschid, a professor in the School of Business, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, and H.V. Jagadish, Bernard A. Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Louiqa and Jag co-organized a workshop on next-generational financial cyberinfrastructure on July 18-19. Earlier this month, experts in computer science as well as finance gathered outside Washington, DC, to consider the need for a new financial cyberinfrastructure, and to elucidate the computing research challenges that are arising in this increasingly interdisciplinary space. Participants were drawn […]

Earlier this month, another huge crowd of roboticists, artists, and filmakers converged on Manhattan for the second annual Robot Film Festival, a daylong celebration of robots on film. Founded by Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot and Carnegie Mellon University and co-organized by Marek Michalowski of Beatbots, the festival’s goal is “to highlight innovation, explore frontiers before technically feasible and investigate the impact of humanity and machinery interrelations.” The festival — themed “Are Robots Man’s Best Friend?” this year — kicked off with a screening of Sundance Film Festival winner Robot and Frank, due to hit U.S. theaters in August. Check out selected winners of the 2012 “Botskers” after the jump…

Dan Kaufman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), was interviewed on Tuesday evening by New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff — the first in a series of conversations with “amazing people at research labs” being produced this summer by the Computer History Museum. During the hourlong interview, Kaufman — Markoff describes him as “not your standard, cookie-cutter DARPA official — touches on a bit of history about DARPA, his own personal background and how he landed at the agency, and a variety of projects he and his colleagues in I2O are currently spearheading. Check out the full-length video and summary after the jump…

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI), “seeking ideas and input from the public … on successful strategies and remaining challenges in the creation of health IT-enabled quality measure development and reporting.” Comments are due by Aug. 20th. Among the questions regarding quality measurement enabled by health IT being posed in the RFI are (following the link):

Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers.” Noting he’s focused on the year 2020, Johnson had the following to say as part of the Q&A: Q: You study the interaction between humans and computers. What do you foresee in the next 10, 15 years?   B.D.J.: Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we […]