Today’s New York Times Sunday magazine is devoted to  the role of computing and technology in education.  The lead article is entitled Learning by Playing:  Video Games in the Classroom.  Other articles and essays includes Hacks into Hackers:  Can Journalism and Computer Science Mix?, The Eight-Year-Old Programmer, among others.

The internet is abuzz with stories about a purported proof that the class P is not equal to the class NP.  The author of the proof is Dr. Vinay Deolalikar, a Principal Research Scientist at HP Lab.  Professor Richard Lipton’s blog provides some interesting comments and reflections on this manuscript.

Today at the biennial Snowbird Conference, Jan Cuny (NSF), Owen Astrachan (Duke University), and Larry Snyder (U. Washington) gave an inspiring talk about a new advanced placement  course in computer science that is being developed by a group sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the College Board. The new “AP Computer Science: Principles” course is designed to expose students to computer science as a creative and intellectually rich endeavor that has an impact on society. The Principles course comes in response to the observation that the current offerings at most high schools are not appealing to many students.  These courses are either on computing literacy (e.g. using word processors […]

A workshop entitled “What Now in Instruction-Level Parallelism Research?” will be held on September 20-21, 2010 in Seattle, WA.  While we encourage you to submit a position paper to this workshop, you are also encouraged to post your thoughts right here on this blog! Historically, the computing industry has been driven by a set of exponential increases in single-thread performance. The ubiquity of multi-cores and the fact that much of the IT industry is relying on main-streaming parallel processing for survival is a truly seismic event. At the same time, there remains a huge gap between the theoretical limits of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and what processors actually attain. Novel techniques […]

Ken Jennings, the man known for his record-breaking streak of 74 consecutive wins and $2.52 million in earnings on the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy! back in 2004, may have some competition on his hands. This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contains an incredibly fascinating expose about “Watson,” an advanced “question answering” machine that IBM researchers have been busy developing for the past half-decade.  The story provides a step-by-step account of the challenges and research advances underlying Watson’s development — including a detailed description of how Watson works today.  It chronicles early wins — and, notably, losses — for the supercomputer versus real-life former Jeopardy! contests.  And it describes ways in which natural language processing and data mining advances […]

(Contributed by Dr. Christine Alvarado, Harvey Mudd College) The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual summit took place last Tuesday through Thursday in Portland, OR. Hundreds of people dedicated to increasing the number of women in the IT field packed Portland’s Hotel Monaco and Intel’s Jones Farm campus to experience a stimulating three days of conversation and presentations on the state of women in information technology in education (K-12 and higher ed), industry, and government. For those not familiar with NCWIT, it is a non-profit coalition of organizations whose goal is to increase women’s participation in information technology. It is concerned with all sectors, and its member […]