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James Kuffner, Google Robotics Researcher
From ACM Opinion

James Kuffner, Google Robotics Researcher

At a racetrack in Florida this weekend, 16 robots competed to complete a series of tasks inspired by challenges faced in cleaning up the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi...

Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think
From ACM Opinion

Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and...

Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
From ACM Opinion

Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning

Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-drivingUdacity...

The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist
From ACM Opinion

The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection.

Interview with Brain Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun
From ACM Opinion

Interview with Brain Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun

Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project, which President Obama announced in his State of the Union address in February, will...

From ACM Opinion

Why Obama's Brain-Mapping Project Matters

Last week, President Obama officially announced $100 million in funding for arguably the most ambitious neuroscience initiative ever proposed.

The Brain Is Not Computable
From ACM Opinion

The Brain Is Not Computable

Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is "a bunch...

What Makes a Mind? Kurzweil and Google May Be Surprised
From ACM Opinion

What Makes a Mind? Kurzweil and Google May Be Surprised

After writing about Ray Kurzweil’s ambitious plan to create a super-intelligent personal assistant in his new job at Google (see "Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a...

By Hiring Kurzweil, Google Just Killed the Singularity
From ACM Opinion

By Hiring Kurzweil, Google Just Killed the Singularity

Late last Friday, Google announced a jaw-dropping hire: Ray Kurzweil will join the company as a Director of Engineering. Has the world’s brainiest tech company"rapture...

Automate or Perish
From ACM Careers

Automate or Perish

In Automate This, a book due out next month, author and entrepreneur Christopher Steiner tells the story of stockbroker Thomas Peterffy, the creator of the first...

Three Questions For Patti Maes
From ACM TechNews

Three Questions For Patti Maes

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Patti Maes recently spoke with Technology Review to discuss the future of mobile technology.  

Where Speech Recognition Is Going
From ACM Opinion

Where Speech Recognition Is Going

Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was...

Was Cameron's Deep Dive as ­seless as Manned Space Flight?
From ACM Opinion

Was Cameron's Deep Dive as ­seless as Manned Space Flight?

Ninety-nine percent of what we know about the solar system came to us from unmanned probes.  

Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence

Google and Microsoft don't share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals...

From ACM Opinion

Don't ­nderestimate the Singularity

Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he...

From ACM Opinion

The Singularity Isn't Near

 Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter...

Google Searching For New Ideas
From ACM Opinion

Google Searching For New Ideas

If anyone can preview the future of computing, it should be Alfred Spector, Google's director of research. Spector's team focuses on the most challenging areas...

Seeing the Future of the Office Internet
From ACM News

Seeing the Future of the Office Internet

Inside the headquarters of networking giant Cisco in San Jose, California, lies a technology showcase where executives can test out advanced technologies like...

Workplace Robots Need a Better View
From ACM News

Workplace Robots Need a Better View

Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says a new generation of industrial robots could be enabled by better machine vision.

A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence

If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...
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