Technology is often only as good as the human using it 🙂
More funny “fail” pictures at FAIL Blog
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FACT: The Washington Post today has a story in the Business section (“Intelligence Agency Joins U-Md. Research Center“) about the relationship between IARPA and the University of Maryland, the location of the planned new IARPA headquarters.
ANALYSIS: UMd has a set of valuable relationships with the public- and private-sector national security community, and the IARPA startup is just the latest agency to benefit. Proximity is key, for research and bureaucracy. In Maryland’s case, IARPA Director Lisa Porter told an IEEE interviewer last month that “It’s nice not to be sitting right next to one particular agency. It’s also nice to be near a university because we’re sending a message that we want to bring in nontraditional partners: academia, industry. It sends a nice message that we’re embracing the broad community to help us solve these challenging problems.”
I lament sometimes that Charlottesville (home to my undergraduate alma mater) is a good two hours away from DC, as even that distance puts a frustrating limit on the amount of joint work that winds up being done with Virginia faculty and students.
Filed under: Government, innovation, Intelligence, Microsoft, R&D, Technology | Tagged: Abe Lederman, academia, academic, blogs, Charlottesville, China, computer, DARPA, database, Deep Web, DeepWeb Technologies, Defense, DoD, Europe, federal, federal government, federated search, Google, Government, IARPA, IC, IDA, IEEE, Intelligence, Intelligence Community, internet, IT, Lisa Porter, Maryland, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, MSR, OSTI, policy, politics, public policy, R&D, radius, RAND, ReadWriteWeb, research, Russia, scholar, science, search, search engines, STPI, tech, Technology, UMD, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, UVA, Verity, Virginia, web, White House, WorldWideScience | 1 Comment »
I’m in Cairo this week, my first-ever trip to Egypt, visiting the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) – they’re doing some really interesting work particularly in Information Retrieval, Collaborative Content Services, and Digital Content Services – a very web-minded, web-services driven set of research and development activities with some real payoff in areas like machine translation and collaborative practices. More information on their work at http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/egypt/cmic/.
I love Cairo already, on just my second day here. I’ve posted some photos at a Flickr collection, and I’ll keep adding to those….
Filed under: Microsoft, R&D, Society, Technology | Tagged: Cairo, CMIC, collaboration, digital, digital content, Egypt, information retrieval, innovation, invention, Microsoft, R&D, research, SOA, tech, Technology, travel, web services | Leave a comment »
FACT: This week, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an arm of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched its new unclassified website. What’s there is initially fairly minimal, but they’ll be adding to the public information posted there regularly.
ANALYSIS: I spent the week in Orlando, as a Keynote speaker at the IARPA “Incisive Analysis Conference.” I’ll be writing a little more about the conference in the near future, as I saw some great demo’s and spoke to the principal investigators on many excellent and far-sighted advanced research projects sponsored by IARPA. It was great to be there and to see so many old friends from the intelligence community, the national labs (PNNL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Livermore), DoD, and innovative commercial R&D outfits. Also, as the first IARPA conference since the organization’s launch, it was an opportunity to hear new director Lisa Porter communicate her vision and principles, which she did well and I’ll discuss those soon as well. (She also kidded me about my efforts to make her a cultural phenomenon, but I blamed it on WIRED magazine.)
Filed under: Government, innovation, Intelligence, Microsoft, R&D, Technology | Tagged: analysis, analyst, analysts, cloud computing, computer, computer science, computers, computing, DARPA, data, Defense Department, DNI, DoD, geospatial, Government, IARPA, IC, innovation, Intelligence, Intelligence Community, IT, Lawrence Livermore, Lisa Porter, long tail, longtail, mashup, mashups, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, mirror world, mirror worlds, modeling, MSR, national laboratories, national labs, Oak Ridge, OODA, Pentagon, PNNL, R&D, research, Rita Bush, robot, robotics, robots, Sandia Labs, science, scientific, security, semantic, semantic analysis, semantic computing, semnantics, simulation, Society, tech, Technology, virtual world, virtual worlds, visualization, Wired, WIRED magazine | 3 Comments »
FACT: Answering a question in this week’s Business Week about several recent high-profile departures of Google executives and engineers, CEO Eric Schmidt said: “What bothers me is that some people write: ‘So-and-so left the company.’ Well, they don’t also write that we hired 120 people that week, five of whom have Nobel prizes, three of whom have PhDs, and so on, who are beginning their career here now.”
ANALYSIS: There have only been some 700 Nobel Laureates awarded in the history of the program since 1901, according to the official Nobel site, and at least as of a 2001survey there were approximately 210 living Nobel prize-winners.
So, with some trepidation, I calculate that by Schmidt’s aggressive hiring of five Nobel laureates in a typical week, the entire roster of living prize-winners will be working for Google within a year.
Filed under: R&D, Society, Technology | Tagged: age, aging, Business Week, BusinessWeek, ceo, culture, economics, economy, elderly, employment, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google Research, Googleplex, Harvard, Harvard University, hiring, HR, Jamba Juice, metamucil, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, Nobel, Nobel Prize, Noble laureates, optical coherence, Percy Bridgeman, physics, quantum, quantum theory, R&D, research, Roy Glauber, segway, Silicon Valley, Society, Technology, workforce, workplace | 1 Comment »
Shepherd's Pi 