Northwestern University Application: CogSketch People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. The goal of the CogSketch project is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, is being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), a National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center. The vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today.

You know, that time of year when technologists, pundits and bloggers get into the festive spirit and share technology predictions for the coming year. Being partially curious and possibly not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring with my own set of prognoses. In terms of timeframe, whether it's 2014 or 2050 is another story. Alas, this is a story about intersecting trends, asking the simple yet infinitely complex question of where is technology taking us? The famous computer scientist Alan Kay can best sum up my opinion on technology predictions in his famous 1971 quote; "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" Alan Kay may have been right.

This article is by Sean Varah, founder and chief executive of MotionDSP, a company that makes advanced image processing and video analytics software. Last month the Federal Aviation Administration made a decision that marks a significant step for the commercial drone industry, permitting six movie and television production companies the right to use drones. This is the first time the FAA has allowed this type of industry exemption from the rules that prohibit drones from flying in U.S. airspace. Despite Congress' request that it develop standards in support of safe drone use by September 2015, and despite corporate America's campaigning for drone operations, the FAA has been dragging its feet. Thanks to Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry, a door has been opened for commercial drones.

If you want a notion of how easy it would be for terrorists to slip a dirty nuke, a canister of nerve gas or a bundt cake of C4 through a container port, consider this statistic from the Brookings Institution in Washington: If the newly renamed U.S. Customs & Border Protection agency were to inspect all incoming containers, it would need to spend $50 billion a year. The Customs inspection budget is $2.3 billion. Currently, American authorities physically search only 2% of them. There's no reason to think things are too different elsewhere. "You ought to be damn afraid," says Thomas Sheets, chairman of the National Cargo Security Council trade group in the U.S. and director of corporate security services at Palo Alto, California-based CNF, a logistics company.

The robots are on the move–leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us–and some even do floors. Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland.

Nao, from young French firm Aldebaran Robotics, is one of the better known small humanoid education and research robots--but he's about to be replaced: By Nao Next Gen. The new robot is an evolution of the existing design, but it may also be a revolution because the number of tweaks is significant. As well as boosting the in-robot cameras to a twin HD-video solution, the team has given the bot an upgraded Atom 1.6GHz CPU, a better walking algorithm, better control of its servo's torque so the robots movements are more fluid and powerful, and a few other tweaks. But most significantly they've added in voice recognition from Nuance--the same innovative firm whose technology is behind the amazing powers of Apple's Siri digital personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. Of course Nao will react differently to voice commands than Siri, and it's unlikely to call your wife or set up a calendar entry on voice command.

The National Conference on Digital Government Research, being held May 19-21 in Boston this year, brings together more than 200 academic and government participants and features digital government research partnerships between the nation's top computer, information, social, organizational and political scientists, and federal, state and local government program managers from the United States and abroad. With nearly 100 papers, panels, case studies and live demonstrations, this year's conference is the largest to date. Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, sets the tone for dg.o2003 with a keynote presentation Monday at 8 a.m. NSF's Digital Government program targets advances in government-citizen interaction, improves government agency applications, conducts related information technology research and examines the impact of information technology on democratic processes. The following Digital Government projects are among the many to be demonstrated at dg.o2003: UrbanSim: How does a city grow?

The government's mad science wing has an eye on lowering the cost and extending the lifespan of the geosynchronous Earth orbit satellites that follow our planet during its rotation. DARPA has proposed a system dubbed Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS if you're a fan of brevity) that'd essentially act as a lifeline for the satellites up above us. The program is still in its infancy but would "radically lower the risk and cost of operating in GEO," according to the firm. The RSGS units sound like they'd cure a lot of issues plaguing current satellites. DARPA says that correcting "mission-ending mechanical anomalies" that include problems with how their solar arrays and antennas deploy are among those fixes.

I spent a reasonable portion of last year digging into neural networks and machine learning, wondering if and when computers were going to take my job. So when news broke of the "computer-generated musical" Beyond the Fence hitting London's West End, I was intrigued. After waiting for a couple of months, I headed to a performance of the show's limited run, but I left the theater unmoved. Computers can help write a musical, it seems, but they can't yet write a good one. "What if there was a wounded soldier who had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?" But before you can understand why it doesn't work and how the musical falls short, you need to understand how and why it was made.

It's easy to find computer vision technology that detect objects in photos, but it's still tough to sift through photos... and that's a big challenge for the military, where finding the right picture could mean taking out a target or spotting a terrorist threat. Thankfully, the US' armed forces may soon have a way to not only spot items in large image libraries, but help human observers find them. DARPA's upcoming, artificial intelligence-backed Visual Media Reasoning system both detects what's in a shot and presents it in a simple interface that bunches photos and videos together based on patterns. If you want to know where a distinctive-looking car has been, for example, you might only need to look in a single group. As you might suspect, the goal is to turn enemy media campaigns on their head -- all those online propaganda pics and training videos would make it much easier to pinpoint the whereabouts of bases and leaders.