Sargur N. Srihari, director of the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has won the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) Outstanding Achievements award. He is being honored with the award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and for his service to the community. Srihari recently traveled to Beijing to accept the award and serve as a keynote speaker at the conference, held bi-annually by the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Without machine learning, many computers that deal with rapidly changing data would require constant reprogramming.

As the United States and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical. While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops. To move the technology forward, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $13.7 million grant, called "Linguistic Resources for Multilingual, Genre-Independent Language Technologies via its Broad Operational Language Translation" (BOLT) Program to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources. Brandeis has been given $2 million of that amount as a collaborator. Nianwen Xue, assistant professor of linguistics in the Language and Linguistics Program and the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis, is the principal investigator on the four-year project.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor and a pioneer in artificial intelligence whose famed computer program Eliza seemed to converse with humans in 1964, spent the rest of his life speaking out against substituting machines for human decision-making. "He was a critic of society and science and a true humanist who really touched people," said Peter Haas, a Vienna-based filmmaker who made the 2007 documentary "Weizenbaum. Mr. Weizenbaum, whose parents fled Nazi Germany when he was a boy, died March 5 in Groben, Germany, from cancer. One of his four daughters, Sharon Weizenbaum, recalled playing with the Eliza program in her father's study at her childhood home in Concord. "Eliza was something that was fun to fool around with," she said.

The OOH can help you find career information on duties, education and training, pay, and outlook for hundreds of occupations. Funeral service workers organize and manage the details of a funeral. Insurance underwriters decide whether to provide insurance and under what terms. They evaluate insurance applications and determine coverage amounts and premiums. Computer and information research scientists invent and design new approaches to computing technology and find innovative uses for existing technology. They study and solve complex problems in computing for business, medicine, science, and other fields. Mathematicians conduct research to develop and understand mathematical principles. They also analyze data and apply mathematical techniques to help solve real-world problems. Atmospheric scientists study the weather and climate, and how those conditions affect human activity and the earth in general. Economists study the production and distribution of resources, goods, and services ...

BERKELEY – When scale model helicopters pass through a makeshift "urban canyon" in a test field, or engage in a game of aerial "chicken", the drills may look like a robotic stunt show to outside eyes. Members of the university's Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program have successfully conducted a series of field tests with 130-pound helicopters that not only fly autonomously -- without human control -- but that also react to avoid obstacles in their flight path. "Our BEAR group is the first to successfully develop a system where autonomous helicopters can detect obstacles, stationary or moving, and recompute their course in real-time to reach the original target destination," said David Hyunchul Shim, a research engineer on the project who first began this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering. With these achievements, the researchers are inching towards a future of robo-copters that could maneuver through city streets or forested landscapes. The development of reliable systems that can handle obstacle-avoidance tasks is still several years away, researchers said, but the computational foundations for such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been laid.

Computers can be programmed with rules to use information [information: data with context or meaning ] to make simple decisions. This is knowledge [knowledge: the ability to understand information and, to then form judgements, opinions, make predictions and decisions based on that understanding ] that has been passed on from the programmer. A simple example of this is a spreadsheet [spreadsheet: A spreadsheet is made up of cells, rows and columns. Each cell holds a piece of numeric (numbers) or alphanumeric (text) data. Cells can also contain formulae to calculate their contents.

September's emissions scandal rocked Volkswagen - but it's not the only issue the German car giant has. Alongside other German manufacturers, it faces a major challenge from the digital revolution sweeping through the world of manufacturing, writes Sean Williams. Max Vilimpoc, a Berlin-based software engineer, worked as a contractor for VW until this year. What he saw there, while working on a raft of digital products, shocked him. VW, he says, approaches the design of digital products the same way it would design a car part or engine component.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of making smart machines, and it has come a long way since the term was coined in the 1950s. Nowadays, robots work alongside humans in hotels and factories, while driverless cars are being test driven on the roads. Behind the scenes, AI engines in the form of smart algorithms "work" on stock exchanges, offer up suggestions for books and films on Amazon and Netflix and even write the odd article. But AI does not have the greatest public image - often due to sci-fi films that display dystopian visions of robots taking over the world. Over the next week, the BBC will be looking into all aspects of artificial intelligence - from how to build a thinking machine, to the ethics of doing so, to questions about whether an AI can ever be creative.

Larry Page wants patients to hand over their data to researchers in order to save "100,000 lives". It's just one of the ideas expressed in a wide-ranging interview at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. But he added that consumers need to accept that a new era of open data is inevitable. Interviewed on the Ted stage by US television host Charlie Rose, Mr Page was asked why Google bought the UK machine learning firm DeepMind. "I was looking at search and trying to understand how to make computers less clunky and also thinking about how speech recognition is not very good," said Mr Page.

The nuclear reactor is breached and belching out toxic waste. A mere human would have no chance of survival. But the mechanised rescue team that clanks into action soon has the situation under control. This isn't fantasy - if the Pentagon has its way robot squads will soon handle such man-made disasters. To spur on the technology the US defence headquarters' research unit has selected 17 teams and their machines - from more than 100 who applied - to compete in the Darpa Robotic Challenge (DRC) trials near Miami, Florida this Friday and Saturday.