Scientists have seen significant progress in developing software that can perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. A New York Times article recently highlighted advances in this type of cutting edge technology, called “deep learning.” Deep learning uses artificial intelligence to create things like speech recognition technology, and machines that can drive cars and work in factories. It is available today in programs like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which uses voice recognition software and Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses. But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just […]

Sharoda Paul, a former CIFellow, was recently featured in the New York Times article,“Looking to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption.” After her postdoctoral fellowship at a Palo Alto research center as a 2010-11 CIFellow, Sharoda Paul, an expert in social computing, chose a different path than many of her peers. While others considered jobs at big Silicon Valley companies, she decided to work for General Electric, the nation’s largest industrial company. Sharoda is one of 250 engineers recruited by General Electric, and they plan to increase their numbers of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. “The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is holding this week a first-ever Principal Investigators’ meeting for its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.  From Tuesday through Thursday, nearly 400 academic researchers, industry partners, and Federal agency officials will gather just outside Washington, DC, for discussions about the status of cybersecurity R&D, including recent progress and the large number of opportunities that lie ahead. According to the meeting website: “SaTC is an interdisciplinary program including technologists, social scientists, and educators from programs sponsored by the NSF CISE, SBE, and EHR directorates. This PI meeting will encompass all of these perspectives on cybersecurity through plenary talks, breakout sessions, posters, and informal Birds of a Feather gatherings…” […]

This week’s episode of David Pogue’s PBS NOVA Science NOW explores the future that is being created by computer scientists: “The technologies that will transform our lives decades from now are already taking shape in laboratories around the world.  David Pogue imagines what the Tech page of The New York Times might look like 10, 20, or 30 years from today, as he meets the innovative engineers and computer scientists working to create thought-controlled video games, robotic exoskeletons, and virtual reality that seamlessly integrates with the real world.” The entire 52-minute episode is “must see TV”!  Check it out here.

This year’s CCC Thanksgiving feel-good story features Joy Buolamwini, a 2012 graduate of the Georgia Tech College of Computing who was recently named a 2013 Rhodes Scholar. “Born in Canada to African parents and having lived in Ghana, Barcelona, Memphis and Atlanta, Buolamwini truly considers herself a global citizen …   “Rhodes is not the first prestigious fellowship program to recognize Buolamwini’s enterprising spirit. She’s also a 2013 Fulbright scholar and will use her grant to improve access to education in Zambia. Her past experience developing web and mobile applications for Atlanta’s Teach for America schools will inform Buolamwini’s efforts with the Zambian Institute for Sustainable Development to create a […]

Collections of photos, images, and videos are quickly coming to dominate the content available on the Web. Currently internet search engines rely on the text with which the images are labeled to return matches. But why is only text being used to search visual mediums? These labels can be unreliable, unhelpful and sometimes not available at all. To solve this problem, scientists at Stanford and Princeton have been working to “create a new generation of visual search technologies.” Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist at Stanford, has built the world’s largest visual database, containing more than 14 million labeled objects. A system called ImageNet, applies the data gathered from the database to […]