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I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this: * Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them. * We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. * This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too-and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: "Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race" "Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds" Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out."

The 2013 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings2013): These conferences will provide a high-profile, leading-edge forum for researchers, engineers and practitioners to present state-of-art advances and innovations in theoretical foundations, systems, infrastructure, tools, testbeds, and applications for the internet of things, cyber, physical and social computing, green communications and computing, as well as to identify emerging research topics and define the future.    This is a good chance which aims at exchanging research experience in such fields. It will bring together experts from the areas of computational intelligence, communications, networks, distributed systems, and computer science. 

Can robots work as scientists? At first, this seems like a silly question. Computers are pervasive in science, and if you walk into a large university lab today, there's a good chance you'll find a fully fledged robot working alongside the lab-coat-wearing humans. Robots fill test tubes, make DNA microarrays, participate in archaeological digs, and survey the oceans. There are entire branches of science-climate modeling and genomics, for example-that wouldn't exist without powerful microprocessors. Machines even play an integral part in abstract fields of discovery. In experimental mathematics, humans rely on computers to inspire new lines of thinking and investigate hypotheses. In 1976, mathematicians used computers to prove the four-color theorem, and machines have since been used in several other proofs.

News of cuts to the Computer Science Department at the University of Florida hit the Web this weekend. Shock and outrage ensued, particularly in tech and education circles, fueled in no small part by the headline of the Forbes story that brought this to most people's attention: "University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm.."

The march of science is stumbling and easily sidetracked, fraught with bias, fads and dead ends. A new research initiative based at the University of Chicago and the Computation Institute will use the latest computational tools to scrutinize this imperfect path and better understand how knowledge was and is created. Such understanding could transform the process of research, calling out past missteps while revealing unanticipated new directions for the future.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time.

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

For those of you who don't know, the Raspberry Pi is a "credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard."   While "underpowered" compared to full sized traditional computers, there are some ground-breaking distinctions.  The Raspberry Pi Model B comes as a small computer motherboard with RCA video, audio, HDMI, LAN, two USB connections, and a small USB micro power connector on board - all for just $35.1

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - have developed a "biological computer" made entirely from biomolecules that is capable of deciphering images encrypted on DNA chips.

Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they are cutting classes, the city's education secretary, Coriolano Moraes, said Thursday. Twenty-thousand students in 25 of Vitória da Conquista's 213 public schools started using T-shirts with chips this week, Mr. Moraes said. By 2013, all of the city's 43,000 public school students will be using them, he added. The chips send a text message to the cellphones of parents when their children enter the school or alert the parents if their children have not arrived 20 minutes after classes have begun. The city government invested $670,000 in the project, Mr. Moraes said.

Ever since his grad student days at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Amir Ronen, now a scientist at IBM Research -  Haifa, has been thinking about the intersection of game theory and computer science. In fact, he's one of the leaders in a sub-discipline, called algorithmic game theory, which lies at the intersection of the two fields.

A lot of us stare at a computer monitor for the bulk of our day and reading long articles or books is rarely a comfortable experience. With that in mind, here's a few steps you can take to make you reading experience less terrible.

"As we get more data, we can fit more model. But at some point we become so overwhelmed by data that, for computational reasons, we can barely do anything at all. Thus, the curve above could be thought of as the product of two curves: a steadily increasing curve showing the statistical ability to fit more complex models with more data, and a steadily decreasing curve showing the computational feasibility of doing so."

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard. Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn't a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market - at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. This is like day one of the mouse.  Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.

"The world is anxiously awaiting Cotton Candy's release," said Borgar Ljosland, CEO and founder of FXI. "We've had interest in the any screen computer for everything from portable set top box gaming and entertainment to mobile any screen computing, in addition to a host of specialized medical, automotive and other applications. The size, raw horsepower and combined HDMI, USB and MicroUSB connectivity bring unprecedented flexibility to the portable market.

The smallest transistor ever built has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne.

Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction? Philosophers and scientists at Britain's Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could "threaten our own existence," the institution said Sunday. "In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology," Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.

"Bitcoin-Central got the go-ahead thanks to a deal with French financial firms Aqoba and Credit Mutuel. The exchange is one of many that swaps bitcoins, computer generated cash, for real world currencies. The change in status makes it easier to use bitcoins and bestows national protections on balances held at the exchange."