Robotics expert Robin Murphy, an associate professor of computer science at the University of South Florida, was called immediately and arrived on site the morning after the collapse. Murphy's research on experimental mixed-initiative robots for urban rescue operations was originally funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her response team included three graduate students -- Jenn Casper, Mark Micire and Brian Minten - who helped her develop the robots and their software-guided "marsupial" systems. These intelligent anonymous "marsupial" robots are especially useful in rubble because the "mother" robot releases smaller robots to explore tight spaces unreachable by other means. The mother carries the little ones in its "pouch" into the site as far as she can maneuver, releasing and providing "power" as the "babies" descend from her to perform their search negotiating smaller crevices and hidden spaces.

The Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) studies the inter-related roles of people, computers, and information. IIS supports research and education activities that 1) develop new knowledge about the role of people in the design and use of information technology; 2) increase our capability to create, manage, and understand data and information in circumstances ranging from personal computers to globally-distributed systems; and 3) advance our understanding of how computational systems can exhibit the hallmarks of intelligence. Cyber-Human Systems (CHS) - In a world in which computers and networks are increasingly ubiquitous, computing, information, and computation play a central role in how humans work, learn, live, discover, and communicate. Technology is increasingly embedded throughout society, and is becoming commonplace in almost everything we do. The boundaries between humans and technology are shrinking to the point where socio-technical systems are becoming natural extensions to our human experience – second nature, helping us, caring for us, and enhancing us.

Last spring, I taught a literature seminar called "Before Wikipedia." The subject was the history of encyclopedic writing, from ancient times to the present day. We read excerpts of Isidore of Seville's "Etymologies" and Diderot's "Encyclopédie" alongside works by Calvino, Sebald, and Flaubert. The word "Wikipedia" in the course title seemed to attract an unusual preponderance of science majors for a seminar in comparative literature. There were physicists and mathematicians, a cluster of coders, an engineer, a neuroscience major.

Three years ago, researchers at the secretive Google X lab in Mountain View, California, extracted some 10 million still images from YouTube videos and fed them into Google Brain -- a network of 1,000 computers programmed to soak up the world much as a human toddler does. After three days looking for recurring patterns, Google Brain decided, all on its own, that there were certain repeating categories it could identify: human faces, human bodies and … cats1. Google Brain's discovery that the Internet is full of cat videos provoked a flurry of jokes from journalists. But it was also a landmark in the resurgence of deep learning: a three-decade-old technique in which massive amounts of data and processing power help computers to crack messy problems that humans solve almost intuitively, from recognizing faces to understanding language. Deep learning itself is a revival of an even older idea for computing: neural networks.

Alan Turing proposed a fascinating test for "machine intelligence" in 1950 which remains at the center of controversy. Offered here is a flash animation showing one way the test might be conducted and the types of questions that might be asked. "Is it possible to build a person?" Various criteria of personhood are considered and students are challenged to develop their own criteria and to judge whether or not those properties could be “mechanized†and built into a machine. This is an Introduction to Linguistics textbook that pays particular attention to the contributions that cognitive science makes to our understanding of language.

For nearly 40 years, Ronald Kaplan has been working on better ways to talk with machines. A former researcher at Xerox PARC and Microsoft, he's now a consulting professor in computational linguistics at Stanford and a senior director at the Silicon Valley research division of Nuance Communications, a Massachusetts company that makes voice-enabled software for cars, smartphones, corporate call centers and medical transcription services. While its software has been used by Apple, Samsung, Ford and Subaru, among others, Nuance also competes with major tech firms, including Google and Microsoft, that are working on their own voice systems. We recently spoke with Kaplan at the Nuance offices in Sunnyvale; the following was edited for length and clarity. Q: Can you give me a high-level overview of where we are with voice technology?

HURSLEY, UK--(Marketwire - September 13, 2007) - IBM (NYSE: IBM) has developed an ingenious system called SiSi (Say It Sign It) that automatically converts the spoken word into British Sign Language (BSL) which is then signed by an animated digital character or avatar. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures, that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. Upon development this system would see a signing avatar'pop up' in the corner of the display screen in use -- whether that be a laptop, personal computer, TV, meeting-room display or auditorium screen. Users would be able select the size and appearance of the avatar.

Seminar papers and short presentations: Students will be asked to write a fifteen-to-twenty page paper on a topic of their choice approved by the instructor. A non-exhaustive listing of possible paper topics may be found at sampletopics07.htm. Students should contact the instructor early in the term to discuss appropriate paper topics. This is especially true for those who intend the paper to satisfy their law school writing requirement. Whatever paper topic a student chooses, a student should plan to develop an extended specific example to illustrate his/her point.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Nancy J. Nersessian's research is driven by the question "How do scientists think?" Nersessian's research focuses on how the cognitive and learning practices of scientists and engineers lead to creative and innovative outcomes. She is a Regents' Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology with joint appointments in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts School of Public Policy and the College of Computing School of Interactive Computing. Her research supports the insight that scientists think not only with ideas, but also with the artifacts they create to investigate nature.

The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. When it comes to incredible science, 2015 will be hard to top. Among a number of notable events, we got our first, thrilling look at Pluto, found evidence that liquid water still flows on Mars and began facing the reality that human gene editing is closer than ever thanks to the CRISPR system.