Existing tracheal tumor resection methods often lack the precision required for effective airway clearance, and robotic advancements offer new potential for autonomous resection. We present a vision-guided, autonomous approach for palliative resection of tracheal tumors. This system models the tracheal surface with a fifth-degree polynomial to plan tool trajectories, while a custom Faster R-CNN segmentation pipeline identifies the trachea and tumor boundaries. The electrocautery tool angle is optimized using handheld surgical demonstrations, and trajectories are planned to maintain a 1 mm safety clearance from the tracheal surface. We validated the workflow successfully in five consecutive experiments on ex-vivo animal tissue models, successfully clearing the airway obstruction without trachea perforation in all cases (with more than 90% volumetric tumor removal). These results support the feasibility of an autonomous resection platform, paving the way for future developments in minimally-invasive autonomous resection.

A writer and military historian responds to Justina Ireland's "Collateral Damage." The histories of the military and technology often go hand in hand. Soldiers and military thinkers throughout the past have continually come up with new ways to fill the people over there full of holes as a means to encourage them to stop trying to do the same to their opponents. After the introduction of a new weapon or the improvement of an existing one, strategists spend their time trying to come up with the best way to deploy their forces to take advantage of the tools and/or to blunt their effectiveness by devising countermeasures. The development of the Greek phalanx helped protect soldiers from cavalry, the deployment of English longbows helped stymie large formations of enemy soldiers, new construction methods changed the shape of fortifications, line infantry helped European formations take advantage of firearms, and anti-aircraft cannons helped protect against incoming enemy aircraft.

In Moshe Vardi's September 2020 column, "Where Have All the Domestic Graduate Students Gone?," the short but woefully incomplete answer is that the wage premium for a Ph.D. in CS is simply too small to justify foregoing five years of industry-level salary. But why is that the case? Part of the answer may be due to government policy discussed back in 1989, when an NSF document addressed the "problem" of Ph.D. salaries being too high, and suggested as a remedy increasing the pool of international students (https://bit.ly/2IuFZl7). This would swell the labor market, holding down wage growth. "A growing influx of foreign Ph.D.'s into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of Ph.D. salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S." But the domestic students would find that the resulting wage suppression would make Ph.D. study a bad choice: "... a key issue [for the domestic students] is pay. The relatively modest salary premium for acquiring [a] Ph.D. may be too low to attract a number of able potential graduate students ... A number of them will select alternative career paths ... by choosing to acquire a'professional' degree in business or law ... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a Ph.D. may actually be negative."

The theory of computation is one of the crown jewels of the computer science curriculum. It stretches from the discovery of mathematical problems, such as the halting problem, that cannot be solved by computers, to the most celebrated open problem in computer science today: the P vs. NP question. Since the founding of our discipline by Church and Turing in the 1930s, the theory of computation has addressed some of the most fundamental questions about computers: What does it mean to compute the solution to a problem? Which problems can be solved by computers? Which problems can be solved efficiently, in theory and in practice?

A wheeled robot named Marty is rolling into nearly 500 grocery stores to alert employees if it encounters spilled granola, squashed tomatoes or a broken jar of mayonnaise. But there could be a human watching from behind its cartoonish googly eyes. Badger Technologies CEO Tim Rowland says its camera-equipped robots stop after detecting a potential spill. But to make sure, humans working in a control center in the Philippines review the imagery before triggering a cleanup message over the loudspeaker. Rowland says 25 of the robots are now operating at certain Giant, Martin's and Stop & Shop stores, with 30 more arriving each week. Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based Giant says it has two robots now working at stores in the state, and plans to expand to all 172 Giant stores by the middle of this year.