The establishment of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in 2009 was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream of its founder, the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. His vision for the university was deeply rooted in the historical and cultural contexts of the Middle East. He intended the university to be seen as a revival of the old "house of wisdom," which was a premier institution of learning in Baghdad from the 9th century until the 13th century. Starting as a private library of the fabled Caliph Harun Al-Rasheed, it developed quickly into the 9th century equivalent of a research laboratory and a university. The house of wisdom was the birthplace of algebra and was a milieu where many developments took place in various fields of science and humanities.

Forty years ago, the word "hacker" was little known. Its march from obscurity to newspaper headlines owes a great deal to tech journalist Steven Levy, who in 1984 defied the advice of his publisher to call his first book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.11 Hackers were a subculture of computer enthusiasts for whom programming was a vocation and playing around with computers constituted a lifestyle. Hackers was published only three years after Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, explored in my last column (January 2021, p. 32–37), but a lot had changed during the interval. Kidder's assumed readers had never seen a minicomputer, still less designed one. By 1984, in contrast, the computer geek was a prominent part of popular culture. Unlike Kidder, Levy had to make people reconsider what they thought they already knew. Computers were suddenly everywhere, but they remained unfamiliar enough to inspire a host of popular books to ponder the personal and social transformations triggered by the microchip. The short-lived home computer boom had brought computer programming into the living rooms and basements of millions of middle-class Americans, sparking warnings about the perils of computer addiction. A satirical guide, published the same year, warned of "micromania."15 The year before, the film Wargames suggested computer-obsessed youth might accidentally trigger nuclear war.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Should the application of these synthetic materials come to fruition, they could help soldiers and combat units avoid detection from enemy sensors and satellites. Robot armies on attack, self-driving tanks and massive, long-range, computer-enabled sensors and natural camouflage technology are just a few of the many dynamics expected to characterize warfare in 2035, a set of circumstances now under close and careful examination by teams of Army scientists looking to anticipate the wars of tomorrow. "Our core focus areas include AI, robotics and autonomy underpinned by network and data technologies," Col. Stephanie Ahern, Secretary of the Army Initiatives Group Chief, told reporters on October 14. The effort, called "Team Ignite," is lodged within Army Futures Command. It is a collaborative endeavor involving scientists, engineers, academics, concepts experts, and weapons requirements writers to explore the realm of the possible in terms of research, emerging technologies, maneuver formations, and new tactics, techniques, and procedures.

James Hendler is the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI. He also is acting director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration and serves on the Board of the UK's charitable Web Science Trust. Hendler has authored over 400 books, technical papers and articles in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high-performance processing. Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the AAAI, BCS, the IEEE, the AAAS and the ACM. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.

Kira Radinsky, co-founder and Chairman of Diagnostic Robotics, wants to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. The lessons learned from initial deployments of the startup's AI-based digital triage platform in Israel and the U.S. and the valuable experience gained during the Covid-19 pandemic, point to a future of better healthcare: Providing the right treatment at the right time in the most appropriate setting. At the Mayo Clinic, Diagnostic Robotics' triage platform suggests possible diagnoses and provides a risk score for each patient based on their answers to questions regarding their medical conditions. The Mayo Clinic's Dr. John Halamka calls it "Waze for healthcare," stressing its use as a navigation system, matching patients with the right healthcare resource at the hospital's emergency room or even before they arrive there. The State of Rhode Island has used Diagnostic Robotics' platform to help manage its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Local Digital Twins (LDT) Technology Workshop will bring together technology providers, Research and Technology Organisations, city Chief Technology Officers and other interested players. The aim of the workshop is to raise awareness of digital technology providers and related organisations about the European Union approach regarding Local Digital Twins and discuss how to build European capacity to this end.

In researching the causes and potential treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, neuroscientists frequently struggle to accurately identify cells needed to understand brain activity that gives rise to behavior changes such as declining memory or impaired balance and tremors. A multidisciplinary team of Georgia Institute of Technology neuroscience researchers, borrowing from existing tools such as graphical models, have uncovered a better way to identify cells and understand the mechanisms of the diseases, potentially leading to better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment. Their research findings were reported Feb. 24 in the journal eLife. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. By using new technologies to understand natural and dysfunctional states of biological systems, neuroscientists hope to ultimately bring cures to diseases.

Alongside the rapid development of vaccines, the FDA has cleared a number of COVID-19 breakthroughs for emergency use as part of the ongoing fight against the devastating virus. So far, we've seen the agency approve medical advances including lab-made monoclonal antibodies for moderate infections that risk turning more severe, a rapid test that uses CRISPR gene-editing tech and Fitbit's Flow ventilator. The latest tool to gain clearance is the first AI-based screening device designed to pinpoint lurking signs of COVID-19 in asymptomatic people. Dubbed the Tiger Tech COVID Plus Monitor, the apparatus is an armband that uses light sensors and a small computer processor to check for biomarkers of the virus, such as hypercoagulation -- a common COVID-19 abnormality that causes the blood to clot more easily. Once strapped to a person's arm, the monitor's onboard sensors start collecting pulse signals from blood flow over a period of three to five minutes.

If you are perplexed, befuddled and bewildered about reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and possible visitations of alien spacecraft, you can take action with do-it-yourself sky-monitoring gear. Given the low cost and high capability of today's consumer-grade technology, you too can be at the ready to document out-of-the-ordinary events. Enter the world of Sky Hub, a global network of smart sensors designed to snag digital signatures of anomalous events. These advancements can be harnessed to probe the ongoing, baffling behavior of UAP and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) reportedly crisscrossing the skies. The mission of Sky Hub is clearcut: Connect a network of civilian-owned sensor arrays, use machine learning to catalogue anomalous events, and share this data with researchers.

BOSTON--Technology is upending labor markets, and governments, companies, and individuals need to look beyond aggregate numbers and consider how individual professions will be affected. The report, titled The Future of Jobs in the Era of AI, is being released today by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Faethm. In the report, the authors look at a variety of factors to determine how the supply and demand for individual types of jobs will change. These include shifts in the size of national workforces due to college graduation rates, retirements, and mortality, along with technology adoption rates and the impact of COVID-19 on economic growth. The result is a highly detailed analysis for all three countries across multiple scenarios.