A middle school student who used computer science to develop a hundred million dollar cost savings plan for the government was featured in an article on CNN.com, “Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions.” Suvir Mirchandani, 14, was thinking of ways to cut waste and save money at his middle school. He noticed there had been a movement to recycle and use double-sided printing, but what about the ink (which is expensive) on all those pages. Interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink. … […]

As reported in today’s New York Times, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) announced their formation today as an open membership group to further the development, adoption and widespread use of interconnected devices, intelligent analytics, and people, namely The Internet of Things. The IIC’s charter will be to encourage innovation by: Utilizing existing and creating new industry use cases and test beds for real-world applications; Delivering best practices, reference architectures, case studies, and standards requirements to ease deployment of connected technologies; Influencing the global standards development process for Internet and industrial systems; Facilitating open forums to share and exchange real-world ideas, practices, lessons, and insights; Building confidence around new and innovative approaches to […]

On March 26, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic published an article titled Which College – and Which Major – Will Make You Richest?  The article provides the full methodology and explanations of the study done by PayScale.  What we found most interesting is the information on degrees.  Nine of the top 10 degrees with the highest return on investment are computer science programs.     …no degree in America is more valuable than a computer-science major at Stanford, Columbia, or Berkeley. Notably, the most valuable non-computer-science major in the country is also at Stanford: economics.

NSF is holding a webinar on Thursday, April 3, 2014 – 2:30 pm EDT to share information about the recently released solicitation, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Please register here  by 11:59pm EDT on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. From the NSF announcement available here: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components. Advances in CPS will enable capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability that will far exceed the simple embedded systems of today. CPS technology will transform the way people interact with engineered systems — just as the Internet has transformed the way people interact with information. […]

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 […]